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EDITED BY
PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A.
LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN.
LIFE
OF
JANE AUSTEN.
BY ^ A-^ —
GOLDWIN SMITH. \ , D
LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, 24, WARWICK LANE
1890
(AH rights reserved.)
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CONTENTS.
-♦♦-
CHAPTER I.
Jnne Austen's position in literary history ; born, December i6,
1775, at the Parsonage, Steventon ; the Austen family ;
Steventon and its society the basis of Jane Austen's
works ; her early days and literary tastes ; childish pro-
ductions; a precocious genius; "Pride and Prejudice"
(1796), " Sense and Sensibility " (1797), and " Northanger
Abbey" (1798), written at Steventon; rejected by the
publishers ; delight in her work and in her home life pre-
vents discouragement ; she moves with her father to P)ath,
iSoi ; her father dies, 1805 ; consequent removal to
Southampton ; considers herself an old maid ; views
thereon and on dress ; removal to Chawton, near Win-
chester, 1809; "Emma," " Mansfield Park," and " Per-
suasion " written at Chawton ; anonymous publication of
the novels, 1811-18; Jane Austen and Madame de
Stael ; the novels appreciated by Sir Walter Scott,
and other leading men ; also by the Prince Regent ;
officiousness of the Prince Regent's librarian ; illness ;
removal to Winchester ; death, July 18, 1817; her view of
life ; the tone of her letters ; a foe to sentimentality ; a
lover of nature ; a mild Conservative ; her novels accu-
rately depict the social life of the time ; her views on
wealth ; religion ; the clergy ; her moral teaching ; the
CONTENTS.
PAGE
novels not didactic, nor propngandist, but very human ;
country life as depicted in her novels compared with that
of to-day ; the novels of necessity unromantic ; their cha-
racters taken from a limited class — the gentry ; her work
narrow in compass, but perfect in detail . . . .11
CHAPTER II.
" Pride and Prejudice " perhaps the best of Jane Austen's
novels ; the Bennet and Darcy families ; the plot of the
novel ; discussion of characters ; Darcy's pride and self-
love somewhat overdone ; the solemn priggishness of the
Rev. Mr. Collins— his proposal to Elizabeth, his letter of
condolence to Mr. Bennet ; Mr. Bennet's dry humour and
Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity ; aristocratic insolence of Lady
Catherine de Bourgh ; Charlotte Lucas's practical view of
matrimony as a provision for young women
66
CHAPTER III.
" Sense and Sensibility" constructed on somewhat similar lines
to "Pride and Prejudice," but inferior to it; the chief
characters— their counterparts in " Pride and Prejudice ; "
epitome of the plot ; Willoughby's rehabilitation rather
a strange incident ; the minor characters ; the good-
natured vulgarity of Mi's. Jennings ; Sir John Middleton
half way between the old country squire and the modern
country gentleman ; the cold-hearted selfishness of Lady
Middleton and Mrs. John Dashwood ; the Misses Steele,
vulgar both in manners and in soul ; Mrs. John Da'^hwood
on annuities ; the pleasantries of spoilt children . . 89
CHAPTER IV.
" Northanger Abbey "—a comic travesty of the " Mysteries of
Udolplio " of Mrs. Radcliffc ; Catherine Morland's original
CONTENTS. 7
PAGR
disqualifications for a heroine of romance ; she gradually
qualifies ; goes to Bath ; meets there the Thorpes and the
Tilneys ; a description of them ; General Tilney ; wrongly
understanding Catherine to be an heiress, he invites her to
Northanger Abbey ; Heniy Tilney prepares her for
romantic horrors ; the first night at the Abbey ; other
adventures ; General Tilney bent on a match between
Catherine and Henry ; finding she is not an heiress, he
suddenly orders Catherine home ; but all ends happily . I02
CHAPTER V.
"Emma"; a description of her; the relations between the
principal characters ; characteristics of Emma Woodhouse
and Mr. Knightley ; the plot of the novel ; Lord Bra-
bourne's unfavourable view of Mr. Knightley ; " Emma"
rich in character ; Mr. Woodhouse's benevolent valetudi-
narianism a little overdrawn ; Mr. Elton, the clerical
Adonis, and his vulgar, conceited wife ; Miss Bates, the
worthy old maid Il8
CHAPTER VI.
Mansfield Park ;" it teems with delicate touches of character
and fine strokes of art ; an account of the plot and of the
principal characters ; the subordinate characters ; the mean
and despicable Mrs. Norris ; the indolence and apathy of
Lady Bertram somewhat exaggerated ; her passive fault-
lessness ; the unmethodical and slatternly Mrs. Price well
drawn ; realistic description of the Price household ;
Admiral Crawford and Lieutenant Price ; the comic and
bad characters of the novels generic, but some of the
better ones very likely portraits ; William Price probably
CONTENTS.
PAGE
represents one of Jane Austen's sailor brothers ; a tribute
to the navy 140
CHAPTER VII.
" Persuasion " — ^Jane Austen's last work ; its autumnal mellow-
ness of tone and sentiment ; not so well constructed as her
other novels, but contains some of her finest touches ;
Anne Elliot perhaps the most interesting of Jane Austen's
women ; the plot and principal characters discussed ;
minor characters ; the family pride and self-conceit of Sir
W. Elliot slightly overdone ; Elizabeth Elliott's selfish-
ness ; Mary Elliot's querulous and hypocritical self-love —
her letter to Anne ; Admiral Croft, a sketch from life ;
weakness in construction of the plot ; several more or less
aimless characters 167
CHAPTER VIII.
Fragments : '* Lady Susan," probably an exercise never in-
tended for publication ; its plot ; composed in the form of
a series of letters ; defects of that style of composition ;
" The Watsons ; " the circumstances in which it was begun
and left unfinished ; only one or two of its characters
faintly reproduced in other novels 181
CHAPTER IX.
Jane Austen's novels regarded as a whole : no hidden meanings
or philosophy in them ; she only made the familiar and
commonplace interesting and amusing; their style the same
throughout; the plots generally well -sustained, though
unsensational ; the heroines more interesting and better
drawn than the heroes, but the secondary characters the
best ; Jane Austen's narrow range of observation caused
partial recurrences of characters and incidents, but Lord
CONTENTS. 9
PAGE
Mrxaulay claims that each character is distinct ; though
her subjects were commonplace and tri\nal, her genius has
made them bright for ever ...... 185
NOTE.
Jane Austen's chronological relation to the other English nove-
lists 19:
INDEX 193
LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN.
CHAPTER I.
MISS AUSTEN stands in literary history as one of
a group of female novelists of manners, of which
the other most prominent figures are Miss Burney, Miss
Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier, while the whole group
stands in contrast to the contemporary novelists of
romance, such as the once famous Mrs. Radcliffe.^ Of
the novelists of manners the common parent, to a certain
extent, was Richardson, while the novelists of romance
had a precursor in the author of "The Castle of
Otranto." But it is not in Miss Austen's relations to
other writers or schools of writers that her importance
consists. On her was bestowed, though in a humble
form, the gift which had been bestowed on Homer,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Scott, and a few others — the
gift of creative power.
Short and simple are the annals of her life. Till near
its close her genius was not recognized outside the circle
' Jane Austen's chronological relation to the other English
novelists will be seen from the table at the end of the volume (p. 192).
12 LIFE OF
of her own family, nor was it fully recognized till after
her death. She had no literary acquaintance, and but a
small acquaintance of any kind. Of her doings and
sayings nobody took notes. Twenty years ago it was
remarked in presence of one of her family that almost
as little was known about her as about Shakespeare.
Not long afterwards there appeared a memoir of her by
her nephew, Mr. Austen-Leigh. It tells us her ap-
pearance, her general character and habits, but it tells
us little more. There was probably little more to tell.
The works are the only biography. Perhaps there might
be some disappointment even in the case of Shake-
speare if pious inquiry could succeed in rescuing
details from the night in which they have been lost.
Since the publication of the memoir, a collection of Jane
Austen's letters has been given to the world by her
grandnephew, Lord Brabourne. The genial industry of
the editor has done all that could be done, but the letters,
in a biographical point of view, are disappointing. These,
however, with Lord Brabourne's introductions, are our
only source of information beyond Mr. Austen-Leigh's
Memoir, which forms the staple of this as of the other
biographies.
Jane Austen was born on December i6, 1775 — the
year of the American Revolution — at the Parsonage
House of Steventon, in Hampshire, of which parish, and
of the neighbouring parish of Deane, her father, George
Austen, was the rector. George Austen had been a fellow
of St. John's College, Oxford. Lie was a good scholar,
so that he was able to prepare two of his sons for the
JANE A USTEN. 13
University, and was noted for his good looks, having been
called "the handsome Proctor." His wife and Jane
Austen's mother was Cassandra, the youngest daughter
of the Rev. Thomas Leigh, who, after being a fellow
of All Souls', held the College living of Hampden, near
Henley-on-Thames, — and niece of Dr. Theophilus Leigh,
for more than half-a-century Master of Balliol College,
and the great University wit of his day.
Jane had five brothers and one sister. Her eldest
brother, James, was well read in English literature, was
a writer in a modest way, and is believed to have had a
large share in directing her reading and forming her
taste. Her second brother, Edward, like Frank Churchill
in "Emma," had been adopted by a wealthy rela-
tive, Mr, Knight, of Godmersham Park in Kent, and
Chawton House in Hampshire, and on coming into
possession of the property changed his name to Knight.
Though he was separated from his sister in childhood, in
later life they were drawn together, and a large share of
her affections was given to him and to his children. He
is described as very amiable and full of fun. The third
brother, Henry, is said to have had great conversational
powers, but not to have got on very well in life. He
became a clergyman when middle-aged, and helped Jane
in negotiations with the publishers. The two youngest
brothers, Francis and Charles, were sailors, and served in
the Great War. Both rose to the rank of Admiral ; both
seem to have deserved it; and both left a record of
kindly and gentle character as well as of high pro-
fessional spirit. The details of their profession, their
prize-money, and their promotions, as well as the joy with
14 LIFE OF
Avhich they were welcomed home, have left plain traces
on their sister's pages. But dearest of all, we are told,
to the heart of Jane was her sister Cassandra, about
three years her senior. They were always together,
lived in the same home and shared the same bed-
room till they were separated by death. Cassandra's
was the calmer disposition, with less sunniness.
Cassandra, it used to be said in the family, had
the merit of having her temper always under com-
mand; but Jane had the happiness of possessing a
temper that never required to be commanded. When
*' Sense and Sensibility " came out, the two sisters were
identified with Elinor and Marianne ; but Jane could
never have painted herself as the foolishly emotional
and impulsive Marianne ; if she had, she would certainly
have done herself great injustice. Mr. Austen-Leigh
remarks that the young woman who before the age of
twenty could so clearly discern the failings of Marianne
Dashwood, can hardly have been subject to them herself.
Sisterly love had probably a share in suggesting the
loving pair of sisters in " Sense and Sensibility," as well
as the loving pair of sisters in "Pride and Prejudice,"
and the want of a sister in " Emma."
Twenty- five years, more than half Jane Austen's life,
were spent in Steventon Parsonage. Steventon is a
small village upon the chalk hills of North Hants, in
a winding valley, seven miles from Basingstoke. There
is always a cheerfulness about the chalk country, and
Steventon is described as pretty on a small scale and
in a very quiet way, without large timber, but with
broad and leafy hedgerows, beneath which grew the
JANE AUSTEN. 15
primrose, the anemone, and the wild hyacinth. The
hedgerows were not mere fences, but were of the ampH-
tude usual in the days of unimproved husbandry, with
a rough path down the middle : in *' Persuasion " the
conversation of a pair walking along one of them is
overheard by an anxious listener on the outside. The
parsonage, since pulled down, " stood in a shallow valley,
surrounded by sloping meadows well sprinkled with elm
trees, at the end of a small village of cottages, each well
provided with a garden, scattered about prettily on
either side of the road." On the south side was an old-
fashioned garden, and along the garden ran a terrace of
turf which Mr. Austen-Leigh says may have been in
his aunt's thoughts when she described Catherine
norland's childish delight in rolling down the green
slope at the back of the house. Not far off was a manor-
house of the time of Henry VIIL, which, however,
does not seem to have turned Jane's thoughts to the
romantic past.
In and around Steventon, and in the little town of
Basingstoke, which probably is the original of Meryton,
Jane would see the classes of people and the life which
a village and a litde country town in England presents.
She would see the large landed • proprietor and member
of Parliament, like Sir Thomas Bertram, the small
proprietor, like Mr. Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse, and
the clergyman, with their wives and daughters, occa-
sionally the military or naval officer of good family, the
old lady not of good family, or retired tradesman, living
in the little town, the village apothecary, the independent
yeoman, like Robert Martin, common in those days
16 LIFE OF
though now almost extinct These are the materials of
her novels. If the range of her characters was limited,
she would have good opportunities of studying them,
for English life, which has now become migratory and
restless, in days before railways was quiet and stationary.
In one of her letters, Jane says to a neophyte in novel-
making, " You are now collecting your people delight-
fully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the
delight of my life. Three or four families in a country
village is the very thing to work on ; and I hope you
will write a great deal more and make very full use of
them when they are so favourably arranged." The
Austen family were not rich, but they were sufficiently
well off to go into the society of the neighbourhood and
keep a carriage. Their social position was much the
same as that of Dr. and Mrs. Grant in " Mansfield Park,"
who keep their carriage and entertain, spreading their
table with a liberality which seems excessive to the
jealous Mrs. Norris.
The Austen circle was enlarged in every sense by
intimacy with two cousins, Edward and Jane Cooper,
the children of Mrs. Austen's eldest sister and Dr.
Cooper, the vicar of Sonning, near Reading, and about
eighteen miles from Basingstoke. Edward Cooper had
won the prize for a Latin poem at Oxford, and afterwards
wrote a work on prophecy, called "The Crisis," and
several volumes of sermons, which at one time were in
vogue. He no doubt read with pleasure the passage in
" Mansfield Park " extolling the gifts of preaching. The
Coopers lived for some time in Bath, where, it appears,
Jane Austen visited them and acquired the know-
JANE AUSTEN. 17
ledge of the great watering-place which enabled her
to write " Northanger Abbey." She also visited her
kinsman, Mr. Knight, at Godmersham Park, and per-
haps it was there, more than at Steventon, that she
studied the life of the county magnate, the Sir Thomas
Bertram of " Mansfield Park."
It seems that the family circle in Steventon Parsonage
was entirely united and happy, so that the home influ-
ences under which the girl grew up, combined with the
natural sweetness of disposition of which her kinsman
retains a vivid recollection, gave her a genial view of
life, and inclined her to play gently with the foibles
of humanity. Jane loved company and all the simple
pleasures of life, flirting in a quiet way not excepted.
" There were twenty dances," she says, when she had
been at a ball, "and I danced them all without any
fatigue ; " and this was when she was so far past the
heyday of youth as to wear a cap. She does not
conceal her enjoyment of good cheer. She had a
sweet voice, sang simple airs, and played on the piano.
There is not a greater contrast between the bleak
Westmoreland moor and the soft beauty of the Hamp-
shire valley, than there was between the youth of the
authoress of " Jane Eyre " and the youth of Jane Austen.
Nor was Jane Austen without a share of the happiness
which goes with good looks. Her figure was tall and
slender, her step was light and firm, and her whole
appearance, we are told, was expressive of health and
animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette
with a rich colour; she had full, round cheeks, with
mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel
2
18 LIFE OF
eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round
her face. Such is the portrait drawn of her by her
affectionate kinsman. To a less partial observer the
cheeks appeared rather too round and full.
It has seemed curious that no attachment should have
been formed by a good-looking girl, fond of society
and balls, and not averse from flirting. Mr. Austen-
Leigh says in his first edition that he has no tale of love
to relate. In his second edition he has introduced a
double qualification of this statement. He tells us that
his aunt in youth declined the addresses of a man who
had the recommendations of good character, connec-
tions, and position, of everything but the power of touch-
ing her heart. But he also says that there is one passage
of romance in her history with which he is imperfectly
acquainted, but which he has on the authority of her
sister Cassandra, who deposed that at some seaside place
they became acquainted with a gentleman whose charm
of person, mind, and manners was such that Cassandra
thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her
sister's love. When they parted, he expressed his inten-
tion of soon seeing them again, and Cassandra felt no
doubt as to his motives. But they never again met,
and within a short time he suddenly died. A Quarterly
Reviewer has observed, concerning the attachment of
Fanny Price in " Mansfield Park " to Edmund Bertram :
" The silence in which this passion is cherished, the
slender hopes and enjoyments by which it is fed, the
restlessness and jealousy with which it fills a mind
naturally active, contented, and unsuspicious, the manner
in which it tinges every event and every reflection, are
JANE AUSTEN. 19
painted with a vividness and a minuteness of which
we can scarcely conceive any one but a female, and
we should almost add a female writing from recollection,
capable." Mr. Austen-Leigh, however, is of opinion
that this conjecture, however probable, is wide of the
mark, and that Fanny's love of Edmund was drawn from
the intuitive perceptions of genius, not from personal
experience. He has no reason, he says, to think that
his aunt ever felt any attachment by which the happi-
ness of her life was at all affected. There is little use
in bandying conjectures when we have no evidence of
facts. Yet it may be remarked in reply to Mr. Austen-
Leigh, that if Jane Austen had felt such an attachment,
and supposing the attachment to be unrequited or baffled
by adverse circumstances, she would not have betrayed
it. Complete command over her feelings in such a
case is a characteristic which she holds up to admiration
in two of her models of womanhood, Fanny Price and
Elinor Dashwood. It is not in '* Mansfield Park " that, if
we were inclined to follow up this chase of an imaginary
love affair, we should look for the trail. It is rather in
the passage in " Persuasion " concerning the lingering
attachment of Anne Elliot to Captain Wentworth, after
the breaking off of their engagement.
" More than seven years were gone since this little history of
sorrowful interest had reached its close ; and time had softened
down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him, but
she had been too dependent on time alone ; no aid had been given
in change of place (except in one visit to Bath soon after the
rupture), or in any novelty or enlargement of society. No one had
ever come within the Kellynch circle who could bear a comparison
with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second
20 LIFE OF
attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure,
at her time of life, had been possil:)le to the nice tone of her mind,
the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society
around them.
*******
" How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been ! how eloquent, at
least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and
a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution
which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence I She bad
been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as
she grew older : the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning."
Captain Wcntworth is a sailor. Jane had two brothers
in the navy, and she could hardly fail to become ac-
quainted with some of their brother officers. However,
she is almost as impersonal as Shakespeare, and any
attempt to extract her own history from her novels must
be precarious in the highest degree. Cassandra was
engaged to a young clergyman, who, before their
marriage-day came, died in the West Indies. This may
have furnished the cue for the passage in " Persuasion,"
if that passage had any relation to facts. There was
certainly nothing serious in the case of Tom Lefroy, of
whom Jane writes, " At length the day is come on which
I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you
receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at
the melancholy idea."
An acute female critic has surmised that so observant
a young lady with so sharp a pen must have been ratlicr an
object of dread than of affection to the people about her.
Of the sharp pen the people of Stcventon could not be in
dread, inasmuch as it was not till many years after that
any of its works were given to the world, and none but
JANE AUSTEN. 21
Jane's own family at this time knew that she was an
authoress. The gift of social satire is perhaps one not
easily concealed, but we are assured that Jane was on a
friendly footing with all around her and interested in
their concerns, as she certainly was dearly loved, and
deserved to be dearly loved, by her own family. Though
satirical, she was not in the least cynical or malicious.
Shakespeare must liave been always taking notes, yet he
was " Sweet Will " to the set in which he lived.
If the range of Jane's social experience was limited,
so, apparently, was her literary culture. She was no
doubt well read in English classics, especially in the line
of fiction. Richardson, her nephew tells us, she knew
thoroughly and greatly admired : she had a narrow
escape of being seduced into imitation of him. Cowper
she loved both in verse and prose. A man who cannot
be animated by Cowper, she makes one of her characters
say, cannot be animated at all. Crabbe she loved
apparently still more, for she used to say that if ever she
married at all she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. She
was taken no doubt by the intense reality of his pictures^
as well as by their minute and highly-finished detail.
Once or twice she seems to have reproduced his thoughts.
The following, for instance, reminds us of "The Lover's
Ride : " " Emma's spirits were mounted up quite to happi-
ness; everything wore a different air ; James and his horses
seemed not half so sluggish as before. When she looked
at the hedges she thought that the elder at least must
soon be coming out ; and when she turned to Harriet
she saw something like a look of spring, a tender smile
even there "
22 LIFE OF
To Johnson, whose strong sense must have been
congenial to her, Jane paid homage without being
influenced by his style. Of the Spectator she speaks with
little regard, calling it " a voluminous publication, hardly
any part of which would not, either by its matter or
manner, disgust a young person of taste," and designating
its language as " so coarse as to give no very favourable
idea of the age that could endure it." The last remark
brings home to us the improvement that had taken place
in the tone of society since the days when the Spectator
was the height of refinement and a great organ of social
reform. She read Scott and Byron, and she speaks of
the question between the two as the burning literary issue
of the day, without intimating her own opinion. From a
passage in "Persuasion," it appears that Byron's passion
had touched her. In one of her letters she says that
she has begun " Marmion," and is disappointed by it ;
but she is constrained to recognize the excellence of
"Waverley," though she playfully complains of its writer
for not being content with his own realm of poetry, but
encroaching on the realm of fiction and taking the bread
out of a novelist's mouth. Her contemporary female
novelists of course she read, and she stands up for the
authoress of " Camilla." She defends the study of
history against those who called it dry and dull. Henry
appears to have been the writer whom she studied for
the history of her own country. She read French, but
of her French reading there is barely a trace. Voltaire
and Rousseau were not likely to find their way to the
book-shelves of an English parsonage. At all events
there is not a vestige either in Jane Austen's novels or in
JANE AUSTEN. 23
her letters of the influence of either. Nor is there a
vestige of any of the writers, revolutionary or anti-revolu-
tionary, who dealt with the great intellectual movements
of the age. In her pubhshed letters, the allusions to
any literary subject are surprisingly few and slight. One
book which she mentions as greatly interesting her,
strange to say, is an essay on the " Military Police and
Institutions of the British Empire," by Capt. Pasley, of
the Engineers. It has been already said that she had no
literary friends. There was nothing to stimulate, nothing
to sophisticate or spoil her. No primrose or wild
hyacinth on the banks of Steventon ever unfolded more
freely, or drew its life more entirely from its native sod.
A passage in " Mansfield Park " about the wonders of
memory, and another about the contrast between ever-
greens and other trees as an instance of the marvels
of nature, show that the mind of Jane Austen was
sometimes turned to the mysteries of being ; but of
philosophic or scientific study not a trace appears. She
widely differed in this, as in other respects, from George
Ehot.
The circle of the Parsonage was literary in an unpre- .
tending way. It sometimes indulged in private theatri-
cals, like the party in " Mansfield Park," the barn forming
the usual theatre. The principal part in these perform-
ances was taken by a cousin, the daughter of Mr. Austen's
only sister, who had married a French Count, and, when
he had perished by the guillotine, was taken into her
uncle's family and ultimately married Henry Austen. It
was from this lady, it seems, that Jane got her knowledge
of French. That her attention was at all turned to France,
24 LIFE OP
or that her interest was excited in the tremendous drama
which was going on there, does not appear. Reading
aloud seems also to have been a favourite diversion : at
least Jane Austen makes a great point of perfection in it,
and in " Mansiield Park " Henry Crawford is represented
as almost producing an impression on the obdurate heart
of Fanny by his admirable rendering of Shakespeare.
Jane had from her childhood a taste for writing tales,
and her nephew tells us that there is e-xtant an old
copybook containing some which seem to have been
composed when she was quite a girl. She afterwards
advised a niece who had literary aspirations not to
write any more till she had turned sixteen, remarking
that it would have been better for herself if she
had read more and written less before reaching that
mature age. Between these childish productions and
the earliest of the published works intervened, it seems,
some burlesques which, ridiculing the improbable acci-
dents and extravagant sentiments of the silly romances of
the day, were precursors of " Northanger Abbey." But
it is also evident that, besides her taste for constructing
stories and composition, Jane at a surprisingly early age had
formed a taste for studying characters, especially " intri-
cate " characters, as she calls them, and at the same time
a habit of taking up the position of an observant spec-
tator of her little social world. In this respect the three
earliest of her published works are the greatest marvels of
literary history. " Pride and Prejudice," which has been
generally thought her masterpiece, was begun in October,
1796, before she was twenty-one years old, and completed
in about ten months from that date " Sense and Sensi-
JANE A USTEN. 25
bility " was begun in its present form immediately after-
wards, in November, 1797 ; tliough if the material of a
tale previously composed under the title of " Elinor
and Marianne " was worked up into it, as is probable, it
may be considered to that extent an earlier produc-
tion than " Pride and Prejudice." " Northanger Abbey,"
though not prepared for the press till 1803, was first
composed, as Mr. Austen-Leigh assures us, in 1798.
The first two works lay for some time on the writer's
hands, and may possibly have been revised, though there
is no reason for suspecting it ; but " Northanger Abbey "
we certainly have in its original form. " Northanger
Abbey " is eminently playful, but in no other respect do
these, the work of a girl just out of her teens, differ from
the most mature productions of the same writer. The
insight into character and the tone of quiet irony and
gentle cynicism, as well as the creative power, are the
same. So are the minuteness of detail, the perfect
finish, the quiet, limpid, unimpassioned style which never
interposes the writer between the reader and the subject.
How did the world receive these works which now
charm its highest minds? "Pride and Prejudice" was
offered by the writer's father to a publisher, who
declined the offer by return of post. It is due to his
shade to say that he evidently had not seen the manu-
script. "Northanger Abbey" was sold in 1803 for ten
pounds to a publisher in Bath, who on inspection
thought it so unpromising a venture that he let it lie
for many years in his drawers, and was then glad to
sell it back for the sum which he had given for it.
She who could write such novels must have been
26 LIFE OF
conscious of their value, and was to be pitied during
the years of apparently hopeless neglect. But the dis-
appointment does not seem to have weighed in the
slightest degree upon her spirits, or to have clouded her
view of the world ; nor does she ever glance at it either
in her novels or in her letters. In the meantime she
had joy in the work of her hands. She loved the
creations of her fancy as though they had been real
persons. She looked about the picture-galleries for
portraits of her principal characters; she would give
little pieces of confidential information about them as
though she had actually lived among them. She told
her nephew and nieces that Anne Steele never suc-
ceeded in 'catching the doctor, that Kitty Bennet was
satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley,
while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her
uncle PhiUp's clerks, and was content to be considered
a star in the society of Meryton ; that the " considerable
sum" given by Mr. Norris to William Price was one
pound ; and that the letters placed by Frank Churckill
before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread,
contained the word " pardon." Slie feels the charm of
EHzabeth in "Pride and Prejudice" as if she had met
her in society. She was moved to write not by desire
of money, of which she received lamentably little, or
of fame, of which after all she reaped a very scanty
harvest, but by the sense of her gifts, by the pleasure
of exerting them, by the desire of amusing herself, her
family, and perhaps others, by genuine interest in
character and life. Works of genius are none the worse
because they are wrought for money ; Shakespeare wrote
JANE AUSTEN. 27
for money, and so did Scott : but there is a charm in
the perfectly spontaneous and unbought production.
You are sure that there will be no padding or scamping;
there is none of either in the works of Jane Austen.
Besides, though novel-writing was her delight, it was
not her life. She had a domestic and social life
independent of it, and full both of enjoyment and
duty. Of this her letters are proof enough. People
could see her constantly without guessing that she
was an authoress. It is recorded that she did not
shut herself up to write, but wrote sitting in the
family circle amidst its various interruptions. Probably
she was writing down what she had before composed
in her mind, so that the explanation is the same as
that of the apparent rapidity with which poetry
was written by Scott. She excelled, we are told, in
everything which she undertook. Her mother called
her an excellent housekeeper. Her needlework, both
plain and fancy, was first-rate, and a "housewife"
made for a sister-in-law, which remains as a specimen of
it, is described as showing a finish not less delicate than
that of her compositions, and as being like the gift of
a fairy. We are told that she spent nmch time in these
occupations, and that some of her merriest talk was
over clothes which she and her companions were
making, sometimes for themselves and sometimes for
the poor. Her handwriting is very clear, with all the
letters perfectly formed; and without being masculine
it is strong.
As time went on, nephews and nieces came to enlarge
the circle of her interests and affections. Children were
28 LIFE OF
irresistibly drawn to her. One of her nieces says, " As
a very Httle girl I was always creeping up to Aunt Jane,
and following her whenever I could in the house and
out of it. I might not have remembered this but for the
recollection of my mother's telling me privately that
I must not be troublesome to my aunt. Her first
charm to children was great sweetness of manner. She
seemed to love you, and you felt you loved her in
return. This, as well as I can now recollect, was what
I felt in my early days before I was old enough to be
amused by her cleverness. But soon came the deliglit
of her i)layful talk. She could make everything amusing
to a child. Then, as I got older, when cousins came to
share the entertainment, she would tell us the most
delightful sturies, chiefly of Fairyland, and her fairies
had all characters of her own. The tale was invented,
I am sure, at the moment, and was continued for two
or three days if occasion served." Another niece bears
her testimony to the same effect, noting especially the
dclightfulness of her " long, circumstantial stories."
In 1 80 1, when Jane was twenty-five, her father,
growing old, made over his clerical duties to his son,
who was to succeed him in the living, and went to live
at Bath, then a favourite residence for retired clergymen,
as well as for dowagers of other kinds. Jane therefore
had to bid farewell to Steventon, to the haunts of her
youth, to the old garden with its terrace, and to the
green lanes bright with wild flowers, along which she
had rambled composing her talcs. " Dear, dear Nor-
land,'' says Marianne in "Sense and Sensibility," as
she wanders alone before the house on the evening
JANE AUSTEN. 29
before departure, " when shall I cease to regret you ! —
when learn to feel a home elsewhere ! Oh ! happy house,
could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from
this spot, whence perhaps I may view you no more !
And you, ye well-known trees ! — but you will continue
the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed,
nor any branch become motionless because we can
observe you no longer ! No, you will continue the
same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you
occasion, and insensible of any change in those who
walk under your shade ! But who will remain to enjoy
you ? " So perhaps felt Jane Austen on her last evening
at Steventon.
Bath opened to her observation a larger world ; and it
was a world which was brought fairly under the eye of
the observer, since society, over which the spirit of Beau
Nash still hovered, evidently retained in those days a
good deal of its unity, the company meeting every even-
ing in the public rooms. T Yet during the four years
which Jane Austen spent at Bath, she wrote nothing,
except, perhaps, the fragment of " The Watsons ; "
and though Bath is partly the scene of " Northanger
Abbey" and "Persuasion," and we get in those novels a
general picture of the manners and customs of the great
watering-place, there is not among the personages of either
any character which bears a local stamp. They are still
taken from the class of the rural gentry and clergy, Bath
being merely the scene on which they met. Of resident
society there was probably not much, and casual visitors
would not afford Jane Austen opportunities for the minute
and patient study of character which was the secret of \\C^ 0<f^
30 LIFE OF
her art. Evidently she enjoyed Bath. She scoffs at the
people who affected to think it tiresome after six weeks,
yet came regularly every winter, lengthening their six
weeks into ten or twelve, and went away at last because
they could afford to stay no longer. Perhaps after a gay
evening at the Rooms, and a bantering conversation with
some pleasant partner, like Mr. Henry Tilney, it was
with her as it was with Catherine Morland — " her spirits
danced within her as she danced in her chair all the way
home." Her enjoyment of the social life may account
for the inaction of her pen. Her mind, no doubt, was
still at work, and she was still gathering materials. She
was not under the fell necessity of writing without
inspiration, or before her creations were matured, to
produce monthly instalments of a serial. From Bath
she visited Lyme, which she afterwards made the scene
of an episode in "Persuasion."
In 1805 her father died, and she, with her mother and
sister, removed to Southampton, which was their resi-
dence till 1809. They had a large old-fashioned house
in Castle Square, with a garden bounded by the city wall.
Southampton was a social centre, and part of Castle
Square was occupied by the castellated mansion of the
Marquis of Lansdowne, whose Marchioness driving out in
a phaeton with eight ponies, decreasing in size from the
wheelers to the leaders, may have afforded to a gentle
satirist at the window opposite food for mirth and
reflection.
It was probably from Southampton that she visited
Portsmouth, and saw and enjoyed the beauty of the sea-
piece on some day when, "though it was really March, it
JANE AUSTEN. 81
was April with its mild air, brisk, soft wind, and bright
sun occasionally clouded for a minute, when everything
looked beautiful under the influence of such a sky, with
the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead
and the island beyond ; the sea at high water, ever varying
in its hues, dancing in its glee, and dashing with a fine
sound against the ramparts." She saw also the social
life of naval ofificers ashore, and other denizens of the
great military port, but apparently did not enjoy it. At
least she makes Fanny in "Mansfield Park" find no
society in Portsmouth that could afford her the smallest
satisfaction. " The men appeared to her all coarse, the
women all pert, everybody underbred, and she gave as
little contentment as she received from introductions
either to old or new acquaintance." This sounds like
the verdict of personal experience.
At Lyme she had gone to the balls, danced, and talked
in her letters about her dances and her partners. But
now she was fast outliving the chance of marriage, and
must have begun to look forward to being an old maid,
though in one of her novels she has intimated that a
woman may be handsomer than ever at twenty-nine. It
is clear that she thought marriage the happier state.
Mrs. John Knightley, in " Emma," passing her hfe with
a husband and children on whom she doted, is her
"model of right feminine happiness." But she took a
placid and sensible view of her own destiny. " You will
be an old maid," says Harriet to Emma, "and that's so
dreadful." " Never mind," Emma replies, " I shall not
be a poor old maid, and it is poverty only which makes
celibacy contemptible to a generous public ! A single
32 LIFE OF
woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous,
disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and
girls ; but a single woman of good fortune is always
respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any-
body else." Jane's practical good sense adds that the
world is not so far wrong as appears at first, inasmuch as
a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the
mind and sour the temper. Nephews and nieces grow-
ing up around Jane Austen supplied her with a substitute
for one element at least of Mrs. John Knightley's wedded
happiness.
Both she and her sister took rather early to wearing
the cap which was the symbol of middle age. What one
did the other was sure to do, for the two were so com-
pletely one in soul, that it was said that if Cassandra
were to be beheaded, Jane would insist upon being
beheaded too. Jane gives as her reason for taking to
caps that they saved her a world of torment in hair-
dressing, which in those days was a fearful sacrifice to
the tyranny of fashion. It was, however, in the cha-
racter of both sisters. Both of them were neat, but
neither of them was thought to pay attention to what
was fashionable or becoming ; yet in the Letters it does
not appear to the male mind that millinery is overlooked.
Already, in one of the earliest of her works, Jane had
playfully warned her sex that to dress for the admiration
of men is vain, that the mnle heart distinguishes not
between the different kinds of muslin, the spotted, the
sprigged, the mull or the jaconet. " Woman," she says,
" is fine for her own satisfaction alone : no man will admire
her the more, no woman will hke her the better for it.
JANE A USTEN. 33
Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a
something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most
endearing to the latter." The last words are pretty
sharp for a girl of twenty-one. The upshot seems to be
that women dress not for anybody, but against each
other,
In 1809, Jane, then thirty-four, with her mother and
sister left Southampton, and went to live at a cottage
provided by her brother, Edward Knight, close to his
residence of Chawton, near Winchester, and not far from
Steventon, Jane's old home. Chawton House has
descended to Jane's grand-nephew, Lord Brabourne.
The cottage stood on the high-road, and the joyous swarm
of Winchester boys went by it on their return home for
the holidays. But the garden enjoyed genteel privacy
behind its hornbeam hedge, and had grassplots, walks
and shrubberies suitable for exercise and composi-
tion. There were also rooms for guests. A Miss Lloyd
was added to the party, old Steventon connections were
near, and the establishment altogether seems to have
been happy, cheerful, and propitious to Jane's work.
Inspiration revived ; the pen was taken up again, and
Chawton, like Steventon, produced three novels. These
three were "Emma," "Mansfield Park," and "Per-
suasion." At last she found a publisher for two of
those which she had written at Steventon in Mr. Eger-
ton, to whose adventurous spirit — and probably he
deemed it a very wild adventure — let the due homage
be paid. He gave her for " Sense and Sensibility " one
hundred and fifty pounds, which with gay humility she
accepted as magnificent payment. The entire sum
3
34 LIFE OF
which she had received for her works up to the time
of her death fell short of seven hundred pounds.
"Sense and Sensibility" was published in 1811, when
its writer was thirty-six; "Pride and Prejudice" was
jjublished two years later. Between 181 1 and 1816
Jane Austen wrote "Mansfield Park," "Emma," and
" Persuasion. " Mansfield Park " was published in
18 14; "Emma" in 1816. " Northanger Abbey" and
" Persuasion" did not appear till 1818, after the writer's
death.
The publications were anonymous, and Jane Austen
never avowed her authorship. But her secret leaked
out. There is a tradition, not accredited by her nephew,
that when invited as the writer of " Pride and Preju-
dice " to meet the writer of " Corinne " she declined,
saying that to no house to which she was not asked as
Jane Austen would she go as the writer of " Pride and
Prejudice." This has been praised as independence, or
censured as pride; and if the story is true and the
interpretation of it correct, it reminds us of Congreve's
request that he might be regarded as a gentleman, not
as a playwright, and Voltaire's remark thereupon that
he would not have come all that w^ay to see a gentleman.
But supposing the story to be true, may not Jane's
motive have been simply unwillingness formally to avow
authorship ? In spite of the popularity of Miss Burney,
Miss Edgeworth, and other female novelists, there was
a lingering feeling in those days that a woman in writing
a book rather overstepped the limitations of her sex ;
and Jane, having lived apart from the literary world,
and being scrupulous about social sentiment, was likely
JANE AUSTEN. 85
to be sensitive on this point. Perhaps the failure to
bring the authors of "Corinne" and "Pride and Preju-
dice " together was not to be deplored, since Madame
de Stael pronounced Jane Austen's writings vulgaires,
by which, if she meant anything more than that their
subjects were commonplace, she could not have made
a less felicitous remark.
The novels were appreciated by those whose judgment
was the best. In Sir Walter Scott's diary is the entry :
" Read again, for the third time at least, ' Pride and
Prejudice.'" Sir Walter adds, with the graceful self-dis-
paragement of power: "That young lady has a talent
for describing the involvements of feelings and characters
of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I
ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do
myself, like any now going ; but the exquisite touch
which renders ordinary commonplace things and char-
acters interesting from the truth of the description and
the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a
gifted creature died so early ! " Macaulay has in his
journal the entry : " I have now read once again all
Miss Austen's novels ; charming they are. There are
in the world no compositions which approach nearer to
perfection." Such eulogies, however, never met Jane
Austen's eye, nor does it appear that she heard what
was said by Lord Lansdowne, Sydney Smith, or Sir
James Mackintosh, or that much praise from any quarter
reached her ear. The Quarterly reviewed her in 1815,
very poorly and in a doubtful strain. To the multitude
fed on high-flown sentiment, or romance like that of the
" Mysteries of Udolpho," her tales appeared common-
36 LIFE OF
place and trivial. Her fame may be almost said to
be posthumous. Very far from intoxicating was the
measure of renown which came to her, though she re-
ceived a kind note from the Countess of Morley, and
what was of much more value, the intelligence that she
had pleased Warren Hastings. A lioness she never be-
came, nor, though publication brought her to London,
does she seem to have formed literary acquaintances or
mixed in the intellectual world. In the autumn of
1 815 she was in town, but it was not to attend literary
parties, but to nurse her brother Harry through a dan-
gerous fever and slow convalescence at his house in
Hans Place.
It was on this occasion, however, that a curious com-
pliment was paid her. Her brother was attended by one
of the Prince Regent's physicians who knew her secret.
One day he told her that the Prince greatly admired
her novels, and kept a set of them in each of his resi-
dences, and that, learning that she was in London, his
Royal Highness had desired Mr. Clarke, the librarian of
Carlton House, to wait on her. Mr. Clarke came, took
her to Carlton House, showed her its glories, and told
her that if she had any other novel forthcoming she
was at liberty to dedicate it to the Prince. *' Emma "
was dedicated accordingly. But Mr. Clarke, whether
by high inspiration or out of his own wisdom, suggested
as a subject for a future tale " the habits of life, the
character and enthusiasm, of a clergyman who should
pass his time between the metropolis and the country."
Jane demurely replied that she might be ecjual to the
comic part of the character, but not to the good, the
JANE AUSTEN. 37
enthusiastic, the literary. As to the hterary part, " she
thinks she may boast herself to be with all possible
vanity the most unlearned and uninformed female who
ever dared to be an authoress." Mr. Clarke, however,
had not done ; he had just been made Chaplain and
Private Secretary to Prince Leopold, who was going to
marry the Princess Charlotte, and in writing to acknow-
ledge the receipt of "Emma," he suggests that "an
historical romance illustrative of the august House of
Cobourg would just now be very interesting." Jane
replies that she could no more write a romance than
she could write an epic poem. "I could not sit down,"
she says, " to write a serious romance under any other
motive than to save my life ; and if it were indispens-
able for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughter
at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be
hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I
must keep to my own style, and go on in my own way ;
and though I may never succeed again in that, I am
convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
Nothing came of Mr. Clarke's suggestion except a
squib entitled, "Plan of a Novel according to Hints
from Various Quarters." The figure of poor George IV.
has been covered from head to heel with mud flung on
it, and, with too good reason, by numberless hands.
But let three things be recorded in his favour. He
visited Ireland ; he fell in love with a very excellent as
well as charming woman in the person of Mrs. Fitz-
herbert, ami, if he had been allowed, would have made
her his wife ; and he liked Jane Austen's novels. It is
to be hoped that he did really read them, and that in
88 LIFE OF
saying that he did, his Ubrarian was not telling a courtly
fib.
Meantime Jane was performing all the ordinary duties
of life. She was affectionately tending her mother's
age ; she was the kind aunt and counsellor of her
nephews and nieces ; she was, as we have seen, her
brother's nurse in sickness. She wrote sitting in the
circle at her little mahogany desk, hiding her work with
a piece of blotting-paper if any one came in. Nobody
would have guessed from her ways that she was an
authoress. The success of her novels she watched with
interest of course, but with gay serenity. As has been
said before, they were not her life.
After the completion of " Persuasion," a part of it
was recast. When this was done, Jane Austen was
dying. In 1816 she had begun to feel her strength fail,
though it is not known how soon she became aware of
the mortal nature of her disease. Her walks were
shortened; when they were given up she had to take
to a donkey-carriage. Gradually her activity within the
house, too, ceased, and she had to lie down. There
was only one sofa in the house, a sofa being in those
days a luxury rare enough to be the theme of Cowpcr's
great poem. This sofa was occupied by Jane's mother,
and Jane never would occupy it even in the old lady's
absence, but made herself a couch with chairs, which
she pretended was more comfortable to her than the
sofa. The real reason was drawn out of her by the
questioning of a little niece, who forced her to explain
that if she had shown any inclination to use the sofa,
her mother might have scrupled to use it. In May,
JANE AUSTEN. 89
1817, she was removed to lodgings at Winchester for
medical advice. The medical man, Mr. Lyford, spoke
hopefully, but hope there was none, and the following
letter, written no longer in the strong, clear hand, is
nearly the last :
"There is no better way, my dearest E., of thanking you for
your affectionate concern for me during my illness than by telling
you myself, as soon as possible, that I continue to get better. I
will not boast of my handwriting ; neither that nor my face have yet
recovered their proper beauty, but in other respects I gain strength
very fast. I am now out of bed from nine in the morning to ten
at night ; upon the sofa,' it is true, but I eat my meals with
Aunt Cassandra in a rational way, and can employ myself, and walk
from one room to another. Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and
if he fails, I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean
and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious,
learned, and disinterested body. Our lodgings are very comfort-
able. We have a neat little drawing-room, with a bow window
overlooking Dr. Cabell's garden. Thanks to the kindness of your
father and mother in sending me their carriage, my journey hither
on .Saturday was performed with very little fatigue, and had it been
a fine day, I think I should have felt none ; but it distressed me to
see Uncle Henry and William Knight, who kindly attended us on
horseback, riding in the rain almost the whole way. We expect a
visit from them to-morrow, and hope they will stay the night ; and
on Thursday, which is a confirmation and a holiday, we are to get
Charles out to breakfast. We have had but one visit from him,
poor fellow, as he is in sick-room, but he hopes to be out to-night.
We see IVlrs. Heathcote every day, and William is to call upon us
soon. God bless you, my dear E. If ever you are ill, may you be
as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the saa;ie blessed allevia-
tions of anxious, sympathizing friends be yours ; and may you
' This was in lodgings at Winchester, not at her home at
Chawton.
40 LIFE OF
possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all in the
consciousness of not being iinwortliy of their love, /could not feel
this.
" Vour very affectionate Aunt,
"J. A.
"College St., Winton, Tuesday, A/ay 27///."
In the last letter are the words, "I will only say
further that my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, inde-
fatigable nurse, has not been made ill by her exertions.
As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all
my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over
it, and pray God to bless them more and more."
Let her favourite nephew tell the rest :
" Throughout her illness she was nursed by her sister, oflen assisted
by her sister-in-law, my mother. Both were with her when she
died. Two of her brothers, who were clergymen, lived near enough
to Winchester to be in frequent attendance, and to administer the
services suitable for a Christian's death-bed. While she used the
language of hope to her correspondents, she was fully aware of her
danger, though not appalled by it. It is true that there was much
to attach her to life. She was happy in her family ; she was just
beginning to feel confidence in her own success ; and, no doubt, the
exercise of her great talents was an enjoyment in itself. We may
well believe that she would gladly liave lived longer ; but she was
enabled without dismay or complaint to prepare for dealh. Slie
was a humble, believing Christian. Her life hnd been passed in the
performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affec-
tions, without any self-seeking or craving after applause. She had
always sought, as it were by instinct, to promote the happiness of
all who came within her influence, and doubtless she had her i-eward
in the peace of mind which was granted her in her last days. Her
sweetness of temper never failed. She was ever considerate and
grateful to those who attended on her. At times, when she felt
rather better, her ]ilnyfulness of spirit revived, and she amused them
even in their sadness. Once, when she thought herself near her
JANE AUSTEN. 41
end, she said what she imagined might be her last words to those
around her, and particularly thanked her sister-in-law for being with
her, saying : 'You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary.'
When the end at last came, she sank rapidly, and on being asked
by her attendants whether there was anything she wanted, her reply
was, '■ N'otliing hut death.'' These were her last words. In quiet-
ness and peace she breathed her last on tlie morning of July iS,
1S17."
Only her own family attended the ftineral of lier of
whom they were all "very fond and very proud," more
fond it appears even than proud. The "Annual Register"
did not notice her death. She was buried under a flat
slab of black marble in Winchester Cathedral, near the
centre of the north aisle. The verger who showed the
cathedral once asked a visitor to tell him "whether
there was anything particular about that lady, as so many
persons had asked to see where she was buried ! " Had
he thought of asking the inquirers themselves, he might
have learned that much of what was most illustrious in
English literature, and not a little of what was most
illustrious in English statesmanship, had come to pay its
homage at that lowly tomb. The statesmen perhaps felt
even more gratitude than the great men of letters to one
who has so often smoothed the wrinkles on the brow of
care.
As we should expect from such a life, Jane Austen's
view of the world is genial, kindly, and, we repeat, free
from anything like cynicism. It is that of a clear-
sighted and somewhat satirical onlooker, loving what
deserves love, and amusing herself with the foibles, the
self-deceptions, the affectations of humanity. Refined
almost to fastidiousness, she is hard upon vulgarity ; not,
42 LIFE OF
however, on good-natured vulgarity, such as that of Mrs,
Jennings in " Sense and Sensibility," but on vulgarity
like that of Miss Steele, in the same novel, combined at
once with eftrontery and with meanness of soul.
The Letters, it has been already said, are devoid of
interest, biographical or general. Their subjects are
the trivial details of a perfectly uneventful life. The
people mentioned in them are people of whom no record
otherwise remains but the names upon their headstones.
The editor's sauce, in fact, is better than the meat.
Madame de Sevigne and Horace Walpole threw all their
art into their letters. Jane Austen threw not a particle
of her art into her letters. She says of herself that she
has attained the only art of letter-writing, which is to
express on paper exactly what one would say to the same
person by word of mouth. " I have been talking to you
almost as fast as I could through the whole of this
letter." The pervading tone of her letters is gay,
playful, and occasionally even frisky : you see that the
writer is well pleased with life and with herself; that she
is affectionate and is happy in the love of those around
her. There is a great deal about parties, balls, and
social enjoyments of every kind, and the writer's heart
is in it all. At the same time she is not uncritical.
Sometimes there is a pretty caustic touch, " I would
not give much for Mr. Price's chance of living at Deane:
he builds his hope, I find, not upon anything that his
mother has written, but upon the effect of what he has
written himself. He must write a great deal better than
those eyes indicate if he can persuade a perverse and
narrow-minded woman to oblige those whom she does
JANE AUSTEN. 48
not love." " Earle and his wife live in the most private
manner imaginable at Portsmouth, without keeping a
servant of any kind. What a prodigious innate love of
virtue she must have to marry under such circumstances."
*' She (Miss T.) is not so pretty as I expected ; her face
has the same defect of baldness as her sister's, and her
features not so handsome; she was highly rouged, and
looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything
else." " Mrs. Portman is not much admired in Dorset-
shire : the good-natured world, as usual, extolled her
beauty so highly that all the neighbourhood have had
the pleasure of being disappointed." " As an induce-
ment to subscribe (to a library), Mrs. Martin tells me
that her library is not to consist only of novels. She
might have spared this pretension to our family, who
are great novel-readers and not ashamed of being so ; but
it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of
half her subscribers." " What an alarming bride Mrs.
must have been ; such a parade is one of the
most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine.
To attract notice could have been her only wish. It
augurs ill for her family ; it announces not great sense,
and therefore ensures boundless influence." It is due,
however, to the writer to remember that so far from
intending these Letters for any eye but that of the
person to whom they were written, she would certainly
have been horrified at the idea of their seeing the light ;
nor does her satire spare herself. When she has to
write on a sad subject, such as the death of a sister-in-
law, her emotion is evidently strong, but its expression is
measured.
44 LIFE OF
To sentimentality Jane Austen was a foe. Antipathy
to it runs through her works. She had encountered it in
the romances of the day, such as the works of Mrs.
Radcliffe and in people who had fed on them. What
she would have said if she had encountered it in the
form of Rousseauism we can only guess. The solid
foundation of her own character was good sense, and
her type of excellence as displayed in her heroines is a
woman full of feeling, but with her feelings thoroughly
under control. Genuine sensibility, however, even when
too little under control, she can regard as lovable.
Marianne in " Sense and Sensibility " is an object of
sympathy, because her emotions, though they are un-
governed and lead her into folly, are genuine, and are
matched in intensity by her sisterly affection. Lut
affected sentiment gets no quarter. Sometimes abhor-
rence of it is even carried further than we like. In
" Persuasion," Richard Musgrove may have been a
worthless youth for whom none of his family cared or
pretended to care till he was gone. Still, a mother's
expressions of sorrow for a lost son, albeit somewhat
fatuous, can hardly be the proper object of derision ;
while it would be harsh to say that mourning for those
who were objects of little regard when living must be
insincere when they are cut off, or that the memory
of a boy's faults could not be softened by his early and
pathetic death.
Jane Austen had, as she was sure to have, a feeling for
the beauties of nature. She paints in glowing language
the scenery of Lyme. She speaks almost with rapture
of a view ^^hic]1 she calls thoroughly English, though
JANE AUSTEN. 45
never having been out of England she could hardly
judge of its scenery by contrast. She was deeply im-
pressed by the sea, on which, she says, " all must linger
and gaze, on their first return to it, who ever deserve to
look on it at all." But admiration of the picturesque
had "become a mere jargon," from which Jane Austen
recoiled. One of her characters is made to say that he
likes a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles ;
that he prefers tall and flourishing trees to those which
are crooked and blasted ; neat to ruined cottages, snug
farmhouses to watch-towers, and a troop of tidy, happy
villagers to the finest banditti in the world.
Tradition says that Jane Austen in politics was a mild
Tory. Whatever her opinions were they were pretty
sure to be mild, and the daughter of a clergyman
holding two benefices in the Established Church at
the time of the French Revolution, would have shown
extraordinary independence of mind if she had been
anything but a Tory. That Jane was not a Radical of
the school of Godwin is certain, for she says of a man
whom she meets that " he was as raffish as she would wish
any disciple of Godwin to be." But there is not the
slightest tinge of politics in her novels. Considering
that her life exactly coincided with the tremendous
period of revolution and revolutionary war which
commenced with the revolt of the American Colonies
and ended with the fall of Napoleon, it is surprising
how few and slight are the references to the events of
the time either in the Letters or in the Novels. To the
French emigrants there are one or two allusions ; to the
French Revolution none, though under the same roof
46 LIFE OF
with the writer was a connection whose husband had
been guillotined. Trafalgar and the Egyptian expedition
are mentioned; there is an allusion in the Letters to
the retreat on Corunna and the death of Sir John
Moore; but there is hardly an expression of interest
and none of emotion. Jane says she would read
Southey's " Life of Nelson " if there was anything about
her brother Frank in it. She says a good deal about
cruising and about the capture of prizes. But the
cruising is treated as calmly as if it were an ordinary
trade, and of the capture of prizes what we learn is that
it conveniently supplied fortunes to naval gentlemen who
were anxious to marry, and was at the same time pro-
ductive of topaz rings and gold crosses to young ladies
who, like Jane Austen, and Fanny Price in "Mansfield
Park," had brothers at sea. With Trafalgar, the danger
of French invasion had come to an end, and the society
of rural England, almost unanimous in its Toryism,
enjoyed a calm of its own in the midst of the European
tempest, like the windless centre of a circular storm.
No Sir Thomas Bertram seriously apprehended that the
torch of Revolution would singe his coachman's wig.
If Dr. Grant feared anything, it was that the green goose
would fail to appear on table after evening service, not
that the Goddess of Reason would be enthroned on his
communion table or eject him from his living.
In the navy as a profession, Jane, with two brothers
in it, shows a keen interest : she knows it well, and has
drawn largely on her knowledge of it both in '* Mansfield
Park" and in "Persuasion"; she is versed in all its
terms and ways ; is mistress of its gossip and its slang ;
JANE A US TEN. 47
and enters into the grievances of which, in those days
of patronage and jobbery, it had enough. Here she is
a httle Radical " The Admiralty," she makes Captain
Wentvvorth in " Persuasion " say, "entertain themselves
in sending a few hundred men to sea in a ship not fit to
be employed ; but they have a great many to provide
for ; and among the thousands that may just as well go
to the bottom as not it is impossible for them to dis-
tinguish the very set who may be the least missed."
Nothing in those unimpassioned pages is warmer than
the eulogy on the sailor's character and the defence of
him against his detractors in "Persuasion." But Jane's
partiality does not seem to have extended to the
Marines, if we may judge from her delineation of
Lieutenant Price and his household in " Mansfield
Park." When she was living at Southampton she
would no doubt visit Portsmouth, and there see the
sailor's life ashore.
In her general tendencies Jane was evidently con-
servative. Whenever she compares the old style with
the new, you can see that her leaning is in favour of
the old. She jealously objects to innovations in the
use of words. She likes the old-fashioned system of
female education typified by the school of Mrs.
Goddard in " Emma."
" Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school — not of a seminary,
or an establishment, or anything which professed, in long sentences
of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant
morality, upon new principles and new systems — and where young
ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into
vanity — but a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school, where a
48 LIFE OF
reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable
price, and wliere girls might be sent to be out of the way, and
scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of
coming back prodigies. Mrs. Goddard's school was in high repute,
and very deservedly ; for Highbury was reckoned a particularly
healthy spot : she had an ample house and garden, gave the
children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal
in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own
hands. It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now
walked after her to church."
Such a school, perhaps, was that at Reading to which
Jane b-ad been sent with her elder sister, because the
two could not be parted, though she was herself too
young to go to school.
On the other hand, there is in " Emma " a flash of
something like Radical sympathy with the oppressed
governess. The advertising offices for governesses are
branded as "offices for the sale, not quite of human
flesh, but of human intellect." The trade is said to
be comparable to the slave trade, if not in regard to
the misery of the victims, in regard to the misery
of those who carry it on ! Perhaps the character
of Miss Taylor in the same tale may be interpreted
partly as a plea for a higher appreciation and better
treatment of her class. No other glimmering of the
•' Revolt of Woman " appears in Jane Austen's works.
The gospel of Mary Godwin had no more found its way
than that of her father to Steventon Rectory or Chawton
Cottage.
Jane Austen held the mirror up to her time, or at
least to a certain class of the people of her time ; and
her time was two generations and more before ours.
JANE A USTEN. 49
We are reminded of this as we read her works by a
number of Httle touches of manners and customs be-
longing to the early part of the century, and anterior to
the rush of discovery and development which the
century has ■ brought with it. There are no railroads,
and no lucifer matches. It takes you two days and a
half, even when you are flying on the wings of love or
remorse, to get from Somersetshire to London. A young
lady who has snuffed her candle out has to go to bed in
the dark. The watchman calls the hours of the night.
Magnates go about in chariots and four with outriders,
their coachmen wearing wigs. People dine at five, and
instead of spending the evening in brilliant conversation
as we do, they spend it in an unintellectual rubber of
whist, or a round game. Life is unelectric, untelegraphic;
it is spent more quietly and it is spent at home. If you
are capable of enjoying tranquillity, at least by way of
occasional contrast to the stir and stress of the present
age, you will find in these tales the tranquillity of a rural
neighbourhood and a little country town in England a
century ago.
Chronologically, a novelist of Jane Austen's time
stands half-way between the generation of Fielding and
ours. But, besides being a woman, and one of a very
different character from our early female novelists, such
as Mrs. Aphra Behn or Mrs. Manley, and a clergyman's
daughter, Jane, with her contemporaries, wrote under
the influence of the moral and religious reaction pro-
duced in English society partly by the eff'orts of religious
reformers, such as Wesley and the early Evangelicals,
partly by the changed character of the Court, partly and
4
50 LIFE OF
principally by the tremendous alarm-bell of the French
Revolution. In her day " Tristram Shandy " could not
have been tolerated, much less would its writer have had
any chance of a bishopric. The great novelist of the
period, though a thorough man-of-the-world, is as pure
as the burn that runs from a Scotch mountain side. In
Jane Austen's writings there is now and then a faint trace
of the coarseness of the preceding age. She puts a round
oath into the mouths of Jack Thorpe and Lieutenant
Price. Both are meant to be coarse and repulsive ; but
in our time the counterpart of Jane Austen would
scarcely pen an oath. We are reminded, too, that duel-
ling had not gone out of fashion. " Elinor sighed over
the fancied necessity of this (duel), but to a man and
a soldier she presumed not to censure it." This was
written in a rectory.
That Jane Austen held up the mirror to her time must
be remembered when she is charged with want of deli-
cacy in dealing with the relations between the sexes, and
especially in speaking of the views of women with regard
to matrimony. Women in those days evidently did con-
sider a happy marriage as the best thing that destiny
could have in store for them. They desired it for them-
selves and they sought it for their daughters. Other
views had not opened out to them ; they had not thought
of professions or public life, nor had it entered into the
mind of any of them that maternity was not the highest
duty and the crown of womanhood. Apparently they
also confessed their aims to themselves and to each
other with a frankness which would be deemed indeli-
cate in our time. The more worldly and ambitious
JANE A USTEN. 51
of them sought in marriage rank and money, and
avowed that they did, whereas they would not avow
it at the present day. Gossip and speculation on these
subjects were common and more unrefined than they are
now, and they naturally formed a large part of the
amusement of the opulent and idle class from which
Jane Austen's characters were drawn. She only preserves
dramatic truth. Often, too, she is ironical ; the love of
irony is a feature of her mind, and for this also allowance
must be made. She does not approve or reward match-
making or husband-hunting. Mrs. Jennings, the great
matchmaker in " Sense and Sensibility," is also a paragon
of vulgarity. Mrs. Norris's matchmaking in " Mansfield
Park " leads to the most calamitous results. Charlotte
Lucas in "Pride and Prejudice," who unblushingly avows
that her object is a husband with a good income, gets
what she sought, but you are made to see that she has
bought it dear.
So with regard to the question of money. Jane is
thoroughly practical. She admits that a sufificiency of
money is essential to happiness, but she rebukes the
craving for anything more than a sufficiency. She dis-
tinctly protests against mercenary marriage, and brings it
to shame both in the case of Willoughby in " Sense and
Sensibility " and in that of ^Villiam Elliot in " Per-
suasion." She protests, in the former of these tales,
against separating two young people who were attached
to each other on the mere ground of money, and, in the
latter, she makes misery result from the breaking off of
an engagement on the same grounds. She says that a
man would like to give a woman a more comfortable
52 LIFE OF
liome than that from which he takes her, and she implies
that the woman would like to have the more comfortable
home given her ; but in this she commits no treason
against love. Still she is practical, and so apparently
was Shakespeare. After all, the heroines of romantic
and sentimental novels seldom end in poverty: often
they marry young gentlemen of large fortune. Of Jane's
six heroines, three are made happy by clergymen of
moderate incomes ; one marries an officer in the navy,
with no fortune but his pay and his prize-money ; one
marries a man of moderate estate, who holds his place
in her heart against more brilliant expectations ; and the
sixth, though only an old man's life stands between her
and poverty, refuses the owner of a splendid mansion
and a great estate, with high family and social rank into
the bargain. This would hardly, even in our own days
of disinterested affection, be called an inordinate sacri-
fice of female hearts to Mammon. Not in one instance
is it suggested that a heroine is moved by anything but
love. " The enthusiasm of a woman's love," it is said of
Fanny in " Mansfield Park," " is even beyond the bio-
grapher's. To her the handwriting of the man she loves
itself, independent of anything it may convey, is a
blessedness."
The good Sir Robert Harry Inglis, while he intensely
admired Miss Austen, could never speak of her without
lamenting the absence of any reference to religion, which
he would perhaps have liked her to introduce after the
fashion of Mrs. Barbauld or Hannah More. The
absence of reference to religion is not total. In
" Mansfield Park " the ruin of two young ladies is
JANE AUSTEN. 53
ascribed to the neglect of those who brought them
up to make their rehgion practical as well as theo-
retical. In another tale, it is alleged as an objection
to a lover that he is in the habit of travelling on
Sundays. However, in those days genteel people,
except in very special circles, such as those around
Bishop Porteus or Simeon, whatever their sentiments
might be, did not talk about religion. This was due,
no doubt, largely to indifference; but in some degree
it also proceeded from reverence. There can be no
doubt about the profoundly religious character of John-
son, yet he did not talk much about religion, nor is
there much about it in his works. Jane Austen's end
we know was religious, and there is not the slightest
reason for doubting that her life was, or that her
allegiance to duty had religion for its basis. In this
as in everything else, she was sure to be moderate
and unenthusiastic. Her model of a preacher, she lets
us see, was the moderate and very far from
enthusiastic Blair. This may be thought hardly
creditable either to her spiritual or her literary taste.
Blair, once so famous, has now become an object of
ridicule. His rhetorical flourishes, it is true, are some-
times insufferable. But those who have patience to
read him will find that there were grounds for his
popularity. His ethics are sound ; his view of life and
duty is sensible ; and he sets forth an ideal of religious
character attainable by people of the world. Johnson
spoke of him with respect, though he was a Scotchman
and a Presbyterian.
The standard of clerical duty in those days was low
64 LIFE OF
compared with what it is now. The Established Church,
though its slumber had been a little disturbed by
Methodism, had not been thoroughly aroused by the
formidable advance of Political Dissent and Rationalism
hand in hand with Democracy. It was still thought
enough if a clergyman went decently through the
services on Sunday, christened, married and buried,
and perhaps gave a little help and advice to the poor.
Non-residence and pluralism were common and were
licensed by opinion. Livings were treated like any
other kinds of property, were bought and sold without
misgiving or disguise, and were the usual provision for
a younger son. In this as in other respects, Jane
Austen's novels faithfully reflect the little world in which
she lived. She shows herself rather in advance of her
age by making the patron of a living insist on residence
when he gives it to the younger son, instead of allowing
the son to continue living at the paternal mansion and
ride over to his parish once a week to do duty.
Pluralism she could not have denounced without con-
demning her own father, who held two livings, though
they were close together. On the social importance of
the clerical office she dwells emphatically in the form
of a reply to a worldly and ambitious woman who does
not like to marry a clergyman, and she magnifies the
gift of preaching. If she has gibbeted clerical syco-
phancy in the person of Mr. Collins, this does not show
tluit she despised the clergy, but that she wished to
laugh the clergy out of a sycophancy which disgraced
the profession. Even Mr. Collins, though absurd, is
not represented as otherwise than sincere, and it is by
JANE AUSTEN. 55
painting religious hypocrites that novehsts have given
the most deadly blows to religion.
Sir Robert Inglis would not have denied that Jane
Austen's morality is pure, or that her moral judgment
and her estimate of character are sound. She is far
indeed from any idea of making sentimental capital, as
Bulwer does, by tampering with the moral law. If she
often playfully exposes insincerity and self-deception, if
she sometimes, especially in the freshness of her youth,
says things which verge on cynicism, she' is never really
cynical, nor does she ever shake our faith in virtue.
When she speaks of duty, different as her strain may
be from that of Wordsworth, the ring is as true as that
of his Ode.
On the other hand, to the class now much in vogue
of novels with a purpose or propagandist novels, those
of Jane Austen emphatically do not belong. Her object
as a writer of fiction is not to form your opinions,
theological, political, or social, nor is it to reform your
character, but to impart to you the pleasure which she
felt herself. In a passage in " Northanger Abbey " she
comes for once before the curtain to defend the readers
and writers of novels against the cant of their detractors.
A perfect novel is there described as "a work in which
the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which
the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the
happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions
of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best chosen language." Nothing is said about instruc-
tion, or about correction of manners. It has been said
in praise of a great novehst of a later day, that when
56 LIFE OF
you read her you are in a confessional. Being in a
confessional may be very salutary, but it is not pure
delight. Jane Austen, by her creative genius, has pro-
duced so many charming groups of figures among whom
the serious and comic parts of character are distributed.
At her word they move from scene to scene through
the little drama of their lives, developing their characters
as they go. You look on, enjoy the show and forget
your cates. Perhaps at the same time you insensibly
improve your knowledge of humanity and of yourself,
enlarge your sympathies, and, it may be, take in some
lesson of unselfishness, courtesy, respect for the feelings
of others. No higher mission had Jane Austen; no
higher mission did she pretend to have : if you want
a theologian, a political philosopher, a regenerator of
society, or a moral disciplinarian in your novelist, you
must look elsewhere.
The country life of England which Jane Austen
painted, though at this moment it seems to be on the
verge of critical change, has hitherto remained in its
leading features what it was in her time. Sir Thomas
Bertram, General Tilney, or Mr. Darcy, the great land-
owner and local magnate, still dwells in his lordly
Mansfield, Northanger, or Pemberley Manor, with its
park six miles round, with his train of dependents, and
in his pristine dignity, though shorn by modern senti-
ment of some of the outward trappings of his state, such
as the carriage and four with outriders which used
to dazzle the eyes of all gazers in the market town.
Below the great landowner there are still the small land-
owners and lesser gentry, such as Mr. Bennet and Mr,
JANE AUSTEN. 57
Woodhouse, living often, as Mr. Woodhouse did, on the
outskirts of the town or village. There are the parish
clergy, many of them connected with the gentry by
family ties, as family livings have not ceased to exist,
and all of them belonging to the gentry as an Order.
Below these again are still in the country the tenant
farmer and the labourer, and in the town the professional
man or retired tradesman, ranking as a sort of half
gentleman, and the shopkeepers. The squire's reign,
however, though ancient, is no longer solitary, for com-
mercial weahh has planted its sumptuous villa within
sight of his hall ; sometimes it has supplanted him in
the hall itself. The richer landowners have often bought
out the poorer, and in the present day, especially
since the reduction of rents by agricultural depression,
Mr. Bennet could hardly afford to keep Longbourn.
Democratic ideas have begun to find their way into rural
society, to disturb the security of its system, and to
diminish the respect of the loA'er grades of it for the
upper. The money power has toned down the pride
of family and the horror of commercial origin or con-
nections which are always displayed by the characters
in Jane Austen's novels. Birmingham is no longer
spoken of in genteel circles as a place from which no
good can come ; nor would a county magnate now think
it a blot on his escutcheon, as county magnates did
three-quarters of a century ago, to have intermarried
with a cotton-spinner like Robert Peel. The clergymen
have become, both spiritually and socially, far more
active and worthier of their calling; they have ceased
to hunt and shoot, and none of them would now avow,
68 LIFE OF
as a clergyman docs in " Persuasion," that he thought
himself very lucky in being presented to a benefice
where the neighbouring proprietors preserved strictly,
and there would be good sport. The Neo-Catholic
movement has spread over the parishes, or at least over
the rectories ; the churches have been restored and the
parsons have become ritualistic. The clergyman is now
always resident, and there could be no question whether
Edmund Bertram should go to live among his parishioners
or continue to live at Mansfield Park. On the other
hand, railroads and the general movement of the age
have made the squire restless : he spends less of his
time at home, more in T.ondon or on the Continent.
In Jane Austen's day only the grandees went to town
for the season. Mr. Knightley spent the year in his
own place. Sir Thomas Bertram, since he had ceased
to be a member of Parliament, passed his days quietly
in his mansion, and his family did the same; only the
eldest son, as a sporting man, making trips to New-
market. In these days the family would be going to
the Continent every year. If Mr. Allen goes to Bath,
it is for his gout, and though a wish for gay society drew
many to the great watering-place, it seems to have been
under pretence of taking the waters. The squire's in-
tellectual horizon has been enlarged with that of the
rest of the world by journalism and telegraphs. Perhaps
since the reform of the Universities he is somewhat
better educated, though he is still not a reading man.
Perhaps his wife and daughters have also shared the
march of intellect, and are somewhat less devoted to
fancy needlework and gossip. His manners and
JANE AUSTEN. 59
language have no doubt improved. The march of
refined luxury beginning in the city has extended to the
hall, and the craving for all that is exciting and stimu-
lating has altered the character of the old sports,
turning the hunt into a steeplechase and the shooting-
party into a battue. But the life which Jane Austen
painted retains its leading features, and is recognized
by the reader at the present day with little effort of
the imagination. It is a life of opulent quiet and rather
dull enjoyment, physically and morally healthy com-
pared with that of a French aristocracy, though without
much of the salt of duty ; a life uneventful, exempt
from arduous struggles and devoid of heroism, a
life presenting no materials for tragedy and hardly an
element of pathos, a life of which matrimony is the
chief incident, and the most interesting objects are the
hereditary estate and the heir.
Such a life could evidently furnish no material for
romance. It could furnish materials only for that class
of novel which corresponds to sentimental comedy. To
that class all Jane Austen's novels belong. She said
with perfect truth that she could not for her life have
written a romance. Perhaps Scott was right in thinking
that he could not have written " Mansfield Park,"
though he could write " St. Ronan's Well : " but Jane
Austen assuredly could not have written " The Heart of
Midlothian " or " The Bride of Lammermoor : " all that
she could do with romance was to satirize it as the
"Mysteries of Udolpho" is satirized in "Northanger
Abbey." If anything approaching to the tragic occurs,
such as the seduction of Maria Bertram in " Mansfield
60 LIFE OF
Park," or the seduction of the girl under General
Brandon's protection by Willoughby and the con-
sequent duel in " Sense and Sensibility," it takes place
in the background, and is recounted without being
described. The nearest approach to passion is the
ungoverned sensibility of Maria Dashwood. The most
thrilling adventures are little more than scrapes, though
they are scrapes in which the skill of the artist makes
us feel almost as much interest as we feel in the adven-
tures of the romantic school.
The scene in "Northanger Abbey," and in "Per-
suasion" is laid partly in Bath, with which, as we
have seen, Jane Austen was well acquainted. But
her characters, as has been said, are still the same,
though they are transported to the watering-place. Nor
does she go beyond a narrow zone of class. Her
personages are all taken from the circle of the gentry
and their connections. If people of any other grade
are introduced, they never play an important part
in the drama; generally they are mutes. It may seem
strange that a passionate admirer of Crabbe, the poet
of the lower middle class and of the poor, should not
have resorted to the mine in which he had discovered
treasures of pathos and humour. With the middle
class, upper or lower, Jane Austen came little into
contact, but she did come into contact with the
labouring poor of the country parish, and we see that
she went among them like a good clergyman's daughter,
made friends of them and reheved their wants. She
could not, however, have the same opportunities of
studying their life and characters thoroughly as she had
JANE AUSTEN. 61
of studying thoroughly the life and characters of those
with whom her life was passed. Furthermore the squalor
of extreme poverty would be likely to repel her, for she
was evidently very refined in her tastes, and she is
probably giving expression to her own sentiment when
she makes Fanny Price recoil from the coarseness and
untidiness of her father's house, and contrast them with
the gentility of Mansfield Park. The interesting part of
poverty, again, and its capacity of affording materials
for art, poetry, or fiction, lie too much in the struggles
and sufferings of the poor : these are tragic, and tragedy
was not the line of Jane Austen. It may be just to her
to quote a passage in *' Emma " on this subject, which
evidently reflects the writer's own ideas and habits :
"They were now approaching the cottage, and all idle topics
were superseded. Emma was very compassionate ; and the dis-
tresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention
and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse.
She understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and
their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary
virtue from those for whom education had done so little, entered
into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her
assistance with as much intelligence as good-will. In the present
instance, it was sickness and poverty together which she came to
visit ; and after remaining there as long as she could give comfort
or advice, she quitted the cottage with such an impression of the
scene as made her say to Harriet, as they walked away, —
" 'These are the sights, Harriet, to do one good. How trifling
they make everything else appear 1 I feel now as if I could think of
nothing but these poor creatures all the rest of the day ; and yet
who can say how soon it may all vanish from my mind ? '
" ' Very true,' said Harriet. ' Poor creatures ! one can think of
nothing else.'
" ' And really, I do not think the impression will soon be over,'
62 LIFE OF
said Emma, as she crossed the low hedge and tottering footstep
which ended the narrow, slippery path through the cottage garden,
and brought them into the lane again. ' I do not think it will,'
stopping to look once more at all the outward wretchedness of the
place, and recall the still greater within.
" ' Oh dear, no,' said her companion.
"They walked on. The lane made a slight bend ; and when that
bend was passed, Mr. Elton was immediately in siglit, and so near
as to give Emma time only to say farther, —
" ' Ah, Harriet, here conies a very sudden trial of our stability in
good thoughts. Well (smiling), I hope it may be allowed that if
compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it has
done all that is truly important. If we feel for the wretched
enougli to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only
distressing to ourselves.' "
There seems to be some point in tlie last sentence,
and we might suppose that it was directed against
Hterary affectation of sympathy with poverty if we did
not know that the writer adored Crabbe.
Of the worship of rank, or of social sycophancy of
any kind, there is not a trace in Jane Austen. In
" Northanger Abbey," and in " Persuasion," indeed
everywhere, she sliows a hearty contempt for such i)ro-
pensities. The nobility hardly come within the range of
her observation, and she has very little to say about
them ; but she ridicules aristocratic pride in Lady
Catherine de Bourgh, and treats with little respect the
august Lady Dalrymple and her daughter. We learn
from one of her letters that she declined to stand up at
a ball with the heir of Lord Bolton because he danced
badly.
Metaphor has been exhausted in depicting the per-
fection of Jane Austen's art, combined with the
JANE AUSTEN. 63
narrowness of her field. The analogy of Dutch painting
is not happy, since it suggests not only minuteness of
detail, but a class of subjects some of them hardly fit
for art, and certainly most uncongenial to Jane Austen.
Photography is mechanical. Much happier is her own
comparison of her work to that of a miniature painter.
" What should I do," she says to another writer,
" with your strong, vigorous sketches, full of variety and
glow ? How could I possibly join them on to the little
bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so
fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour?"
Her own fancy needle-work might furnish another
simile. Her love of the vivid elaboration of detail is
almost unique. In " Emma '' a party is made to pick
strawberries in Mr. Knightley's garden. An ordinary
writer would probably be content with saying that the
party picked strawberries till they were tired. But this
is Jane Austen's treatment :
"The whole party were assembled, excepting Frank Churchill,
who was expected every moment from Richmond ; and Mrs. Elton,
in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket,
was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking.
Strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken
of. ' The best fruit in England — everybody's favourite — always
wholesome. These the finest beds and finest sorts. Delightful to
gather for one's self — the only way of really enjoying them. Morn-
ing decidedly the best time — never tired — every sort good — hautboy
infinitely superior — no comparison — the others hardly eatable —
hautboys very scarce — Chili preferred — white wood finest flavour
of all — price of strawberries in London — abundance about Bristol —
Maple Grove — cultivation — beds when to be renewed — gardeners
thinking exactly different — no general rule — gardeners never to be
put out of their way — delicious fruit — only too rich to be eaten
64 LIFE OF
much of — inferior to cherries — currants more refreshing — only objec-
tion to gathering strawberries the stooping — glaring sun — tired to
death— could bear it no longer — must go and sit in the shade.' "
Here is one more instance out of a hundred of tlie
same faculty :
" When the ladies withdrew to the drawing-room after dinner,
this poverty was particularly evident, for the gentleman had
supplied the discourse with some variety — the variety of politics,
enclosing land, and breaking horses — but then it was all over, and
one subject only engaged the ladies till coffee came in, which was
the comparative heights of Hany Dashwood and Lady Middleton's
second son, William, who were nearly of the same age.
" Had both the children been there, the affair might have been
determined too easily by measuring them at once ; but as Harry
only was present, it was all conjectural assertions on both sides, and
everybody had a right to be equally positive in their opinion, and to
repeat it over and over again as often as they liked.
" The parties stood thus :
" The two mothers, though each really convinced that her own
son was the tallest, politely decided in favour of the other.
" The two grandmothers, with not less partiality, but more
sincerity, were equally earnest in support of their own descendant.
" Lucy, who was hardly less anxious to please one parent than
the other, thought the boys were both remarkably tall for their age,
and could not conceive that there could be tlie smallest difference in
the world between them ; and Miss Steele, with yet greater address,
gave it, as fast as she could, in favour of each.
" Elinor, having once delivered her opinion on William's side, by
which she offended Mrs. Ferrars, and Fanny still more, did not see
the necessity of enforcing it by any farther assertion ; and Marianne,
when called on for hers, offended them all by declaring that she
had no opinion to give, as she had never thought about it."
Nor are we ever led to feel that the writer is going
out of her way to make a description. The elaboration,
JANE AUSTEN. 65
though wonderful, seems as natural as that of a fine
miniature. The scene just given is not excrescence,
since it develops the character of those who take part
in it.
This, meagre as it is, is pretty much the sum of what
we know about the woman. The artist can only be
presented by giving an account of her works. In doing
this our object will be not only to introduce and com-
mend them to those, many we fear in number especially
among people under fifty, who have not yet read them,
but to help as far as we can in the appreciation, or at all
events the study of their construction, of the fine touches
of art with which they abound, and of the varieties of
social character which they portray. We would endeavour,
in other words, to furnish not only an introduction, but
a guide to the treasure-house of Jane Austen's writings.
It may be safely said that not only the guide but the
introduction is needed by a great mass even of pretty-
well-read people on both sides, and especially on the
American side, of the Atlantic. A flood of modern
fiction pours in, and sensationalism prevails. Jane
Austen's tales are known to relate to a by-gone time;
they are known to be quiet and devoid of thrilling
incident ; they are spoken of respectfully as classics,
and as classics allowed to rest upon the shelf. •
CHAPTER 11.
" T)RIDE and Prejudice " has been generally thought
X the best of the series. Philip Darcy is Pride ;
Elizabeth Bennet is Prejudice; and the plot is the
struggle of their mutual attraction against their mutual
repulsion, ending in love and marriage. Elizabeth
has been playfully pronounced a charming being
by her creatress, who perhaps made her partly in
her own image. She is not supremely beautiful, but
has force and charm of character, excellent sense, and a
lively wit. She is the second of the five daughters of
Mr. Bennet, the owner of Longbourn, with an estate of
two thousand a year, and thus ranking among the gentry
of the second degree. Her father is " a mixture of quick
parts, sarcastic humour, reserve and caprice." Her
mother is an almost incredibly silly and vulgar woman,
whose pretty face lured Mr. Bennet into an intellectual
misalliance, the consequences of which cause him to
shut himself up a good deal in his library and take little
thought of his family, while he makes tliem the butts of
his caustic wit. Jane, the eldest daughter, is a great
beauty, faultless in character and amiable to the verge
of insipidity. Mary is a bookworm and a moralizing
LIFE OF J A NE A US TEN. 67
pedant. Lizzy and Kitty are like their mother, silly,
vulgar, giggling girls, always running after the officers of
the regiment quartered at Meryton.the little neighbouring
town. As Mr. Bennet's estate — he having no son — is
entailed on a cousin, Mrs. Bennet may be excused for
anxiety to see her daughters well married, though not for
the way she sets about it or the flagrancy of her match-
making. The connections of the family are commercial
and ungenteel. Mr. Philip Darcy is a young man of the
highest family, with a great estate. His mind and
character are intrinsically excellent, but their excellence
is masked by pride. An only son, he has, by his own
confession, " been spoiled by his parents, taught what
was right but not taught to conceal his temper, given
good principles, but left to follow them in pride and
conceit, allowed, encouraged, almost taught to be selfish
and overbearing, to care for none beyond his own family
circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to
wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth
compared with his own."
The drama opens with the arrival in the Bennets'
neighbourhood of a friend of Darcy, Mr. Bingley, who
takes Netherfield, a large house, with some intention
of settling. As Mr. Bingley is rich and unmarried, Mrs.
Bennet's hopes are at once excited, and Mr. Bennet is
teased into calling on the new-comer. Darcy is on a
visit to Bingley, and is thus brought into contact with
Elizabeth Bennet and her family. At a Meryton ball,
where they first meet, Darcy displays his pride and
forfeits popularity by stalking about the room without
dancing, and treating everybody as beneath his notice.
68 LIFE OF
Elizabeth overhears him speaking of her disparagingly,
and declining to be introduced to her. Afterwards, seeing
more of her, he is visibly attracted to her, and feels the
charm of her character. His ice begins to thaw under
her playful rallying. He hovers about her, and passages
occur between them which are evidently preludes to love.
But he is repelled by the insufferable vulgarity of the
inferior members of her family, especially her mother, as
well as by her mercantile connections. Mr. Bingley has
with him his two fashionable and dashing but low-
minded sisters, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley ; and Miss
Bingley, who is herself angling outrageously for Darcy,
does her best to set him against Ehzabeth. Bingley
himself meanwhile has fallen deeply in love with the
lovely and amiable Jane. Elizabeth dreams of nothing
less than of the conquest she is making of Darcy. At
this juncture a comical suitor appears for her hand in the
person of the Rev. Mr. Collins, heir-presumptive to
Longbourn, who proposes by marrying one of his fair
cousins to make them amends for cutting them out of the
property, and at the same time to fulfil the behest of his
patroness, the Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose pleasure
it is that he should marry. He proposes in solemn form
and is rejected, to the great disgust of Mrs. Bennet, who
little dreams for what high destiny her daughter is
reserved, and thinks of Mr. Darcy only as a haughty,
disagreeable man. The love affairs are advanced by a
visit of some days paid by the two sisters to Netherfield,
where Jane, thanks to her mother's scheming, is laid up
with a bad cold and Elizabeth goes to attend her. Darcy
shows his interest in Elizabeth by defending her against
JANE AUSTEN. 69
the malice of Bingley's sisters and the jealousy of one of
them, while Bingley is manifestly on the point of
proposing to Jane. But all is apparently ruined by a
ball at Netherfield at which the objectionable portion of
the Bennet family displays its character in a fatal manner.
Mrs. Bennet talks of her expectations for her daughter
Jane within earshot of Darcy, and Mary exhibits her
accomplishments with disastrous effect by singing two
songs after supper. Darcy casts Elizabeth out of his
heart, persuades Bingley to give up Jane, Bingley's two
sisters of course lending their sinister aid, and the whole
party takes flight from Netherfield to town. Jane is left
forlorn, and Elizabeth, divining what has happened and
who are the authors of it, deeply resents the injury done
to her sister. Her prejudice against Darcy has been
strengthened by her intercourse, which at one time
seems approaching a dangerous point, with Wickham, an
officer of the militia regiment quartered at Meryton, and
a very fascinating young man. Wickham is the son of
a trusted steward of Darcy's father, and had been
bequeathed by the old gentleman to his heir's liberality
and care. He has a dark tale of wrong to tell against
Darcy, whom he paints with artful touches as not only
the haughtiest and coldest, but the most selfish and
unfeeling of men. Elizabeth is ready to believe anything
bad of Darcy, and her reliance on the truth of Wickham's
tale is not shaken by seeing that it is Wickham who
avoids meeting Darcy, not Darcy who avoids meeting
Wickham. Thus a double wall of adamant seems to
have been raised between Elizabeth and Darcy.
But destiny is not to be baffled, and the barrier opens
70 LIFE OF
again. Mr. Collins, rejected by Elizabeth, has been
accepted by her practical friend, Miss Charlotte Lucas.
Elizabeth goes to stay with them at the parsonage, close
to Rosings, the seat of Lady Catherine de Bourgh,
patroness of the living and aunt of Darcy. Lady
Catherine is an insolent aristocrat, tyrannizing over
everybody about her, meddling with everybody's busi-
ness, and slavishly adored by Mr. Collins. She has a
sickly, pampered daughter, whom she destines to marry
Darcy, so as to unite the Rosings and Pemberley estates.
At the same time, of course, Darcy comes to visit his
aunt, and as the party at the parsonage is often honoured
with a command to make up her ladyship's dinner-party
at Rosings, intercourse with Elizabeth is renewed. With
the renewal of his intercourse with Elizabeth, Darcy's
love revives, and perhaps its revival is assisted by the
admiration evidently felt for her by his friend, Colonel
Fitzwilliam, who has come with him to Rosings. Once
more he hovers about her with a mixture in his manner
of interest and constraint, which denotes an internal
struggle. He surprises her and the rest of the party by
calling familiarly at the parsonage, he haunts her favourite
walk : the mistress of the parsonage begins to suspect
the truth, but to Elizabeth it appears impossible. One
evening, knowing Elizabeth to be alone, he suddenly,
and to her great astonishment, presents himself at the
parsonage. Unluckily for him, she has extracted from
his friend, Colonel Fitzwilliam, complete confirmation of
her suspicion that he it was who had persuaded Bingley
to give up Jane, and she had been brooding over Jane's
melancholy letters when he entered. She had, in fact,
JANE A USTEN. 71
been prevented from going with the Collinses to dine at
Rosings by a headache which her agitation had caused.
There follows this scene, in which Pride encounters
Prejudice with a violence which seems finally to wreck
their predestined happiness :
" In a hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her
health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better.
She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few mo-
ments, and then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth
was surprised, but said not a word. After a silence of several
minutes, he came towards her in an agitated manner, and thus
began :
" 'In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will
not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I
admire and love you.'
" Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression. She started,
coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient
encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long
felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well ; but there were
feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not
more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His
sense of her inferiority — of its being a degradation— of the family
obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were
dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he
was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
" In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not lie insensi-
ble to the compliment of such a man's affection, and though her
intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the
pain he was to receive ; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent
language, she lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to
compose herself to answer him with patience, when he should have
done. He concluded with representing to her the strength of that
attachment which, in spite of all his endeavours, he had found
impossible to conquer ; and with expressing his hope, that it would
now be rewarded by her acceptance of his hand. As he said this,
she could easily see that he had no doubt of a favovirable answer.
72 LIFE OF
He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance ex-
pressed real security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate
farther, and, when he ceased, the colour rose in her cheeks, and she
said —
" ' In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to
express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however
unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should
be felt, and if I could feci gratitude, I would now thank you. But
I cannot — I have never desired your good opinion, and you have
certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occa-
sioned pain to any one. It lias been most unconsciously done, how-
ever, and I hope will be of short duration. The feelings which,
you tell me, have long prevented the acknowledgment of your
regard, can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this explana-
tion.'
" Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his
eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less
resentment than surprise. His complexion became pale with anger,
and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature. He
was struggling for the appearance of composure, and would not
open his lips till he believed himself to have attained it. The pause
was to Elizabeth's feelings dreadful. At length, in a voice of forced
calmness, he said —
" ' And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of
expecting 1 I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so
little endeavonr at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small
importance.'
" ' I might as well inquire,' replied she, ' why with so evident a
design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you
liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against
your character ? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I wan
uncivil ? But I have other provocations. You know I have. Had
not my own feelings decided against you — had they been indifferent,
or had they even been favourable, do you think that any con-
sideration would tempt me to accept the man wlio has been the
means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a beloved
sister ? '
"As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour;
JANE AUSTEN. 78
but the emotion was short, and he listened without attempting to
interrupt her while she continued —
" ' I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive
can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there. You
dare not, you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not
the only means of dividing them from each other, — of exposing one
to the censure of the world for caprice and instability, the other to
its derision for disappointed hopes, and involving them both in
misery of the acutest kind.'
" She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was
listening with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any
feeling of remorse. He even looked at her with a smile of affected
incredulity.
" ' Can you deny that you have done it? ' she repeated.
"With assumed tranquillity he then replied, 'I have no wish of
denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend
from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I
have been kinder than towards myself.'
"Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil
reflection, but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to con-
ciliate her.
" ' But it is not merely this affair,' she continued, 'on which my
dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place, my opinion of
you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital
which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this
subject, what can you have to say ? In what imaginary act of
friendship can you here defend yourself? or under what mis-
representations can you here impose upon others ? '
" ' You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns,' said
Darcy, in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.
" ' Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help
feeling an interest in him ? '
"'His misfortunes!' repeated Darcy, contemptuously; 'yes,
his misfortunes have been great indeed.'
"'And of your infliction,' cried Elizabeth, with energy. 'You
have reduced him to his present state of poverty — comparative
poverty. You have withheld the advantages which you must know
to have been designed for him. You have deprived the best year.s
74 LIFE OF
of his life of that independence which was no less his due than his
desert. You have done all this ! and yet you can treat the mention
of his misfoitunes with contempt and ridicule.'
" ' And this,' cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across
the room, ' is your opinion of me I This is the estimation in which
you hold me ! I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults,
according to this calculation, are heavy indeed 1 But perhaps,'
added he, stopping in his walk, and turning towards her, ' these
offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt
by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my
forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have
been suppressed, had I, with greater policy, concealed my struggles,
and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified,
unalloyed inclination ; by reason, by reflection, by everything.
But disguise of eveiy sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of
the feelings I related. They were natural and just.. Could j'ou
expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? — to
congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life
is so decidedly beneath my own ? '
" Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she
tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said —
" 'You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode
of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared
me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you
behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.'
" She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she con-
tinued—
" ' You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any
possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.'
"Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her
\\\\\\ an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She
went on :
" ' From the very beginning — from the fust moment, I may
almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing
me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your
selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that
groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have
built so immovable a dislike ; and I had not known you a mouth
JANE AUSTEN. 75
before I felt that, you were the last man in the world whom I could
ever be prevailed on to marry.'
" ' You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly compre-
hend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my
own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your
time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.'
" And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth
heard him the next moment open the front door and quit the
house."
Next morning Darcy waylays Elizabeth in her walk,
and puts into her hand a long letter, in which, without
renewing his addresses, he defends himself against the
two charges of cruelly wrecking her sister's happiness,
and of having wronged Wickham. As to the first, he
admits that he interfered, but he pleads ignorance of any
strong attachment on the part of Jane. To the second
charge he replies by giving the true version of the story,
which shows that he had behaved as well as possible to
Wickham, and that Wickham was an ungrateful scoun-
drel. In justifying his interference between Bingley and
Jane, he is led to make some stringent remarks on the
objectionable members of the Bennet family, though he
compliments Jane and Elizabeth by contrast. The letter,
though read at first with aversion and incredulity, tells in
the end. Elizabeth feels that she has been rash in
believing Wickham. She also feels that though Darcy's
mode of proffering his hand, his avowal of the struggle
undergone by his pride, and his assurance of being
accepted, were offensive, she may be proud of having
won and kept the affection of such a man.
All now seems over, but. of course is not. Elizabeth
is on a tour in Derbyshire with her worthy uncle and
76 LIFE OF
aunt, Mr, and Mrs. Gardiner. They find themselves
near Pemberley, Darcy's country seat, and as it is a show
place, Mr. and Mrs, Gardiner go to see it. Elizabeth
accompanies them, after duly assuring herself that its
master is not at home. It is a noble mansion with a
beautiful park and grounds. Elizabeth cannot help
reflecting that she might have been mistress of it. They
talk to the housekeeper, an old servant, who gives them
a glowing account of her master's kindness of heart, the
affection felt for him by all about him, and his excellence
as a brother, painting him exactly the reverse of that
which he had been painted by Wickham. Suddenly, to
Elizabeth's confusion, Darcy himself appears, having
been brought home by business a day before he was
expected, and in advance of the rest of his party, which
consists of Bingley and his two sisters. The meeting is
awkward at first, but presently it appears that Darcy is a
changed man. All his haughtiness and coldness have
departed. He is courtesy itself; does with the utmost
grace the honours of his beautiful and sumptuous home ;
begs to be introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and
pays them the greatest attention, though they are com-
mercial. He invites them to Pemberley. He takes his
sister Georgiana over to call on them and Elizabeth at their
inn. Bingley also is most cordial. Mrs. Gardiner sees the
direction in which matters are tending. Mrs. Hurst and
Miss Bingley see it too, and renew their malicious efforts,
but without success. Miss Bingley at last gets her
quietus. She reminds Darcy of his having once said that
he should no more think of calling Elizabeth a beauty
than of calling her mother a wit, adding, " but afterwards
JANE AUSTEN. 1*1
she seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought
her rather pretty at one time." " Yes," is Darcy's reply,
" but that was only when I first knew her, for it is many
months since I have considered her one of the hand-
somest women of my acquaintance." Georgiana Darcy
seconds by her amiability the advances of her brother,
and her shyness suggests that he also may sometimes
have been only shy when he appeared to be proud.
But the sky of love so rapidly brightening is once
more overcast. News arrives that the feather-headed
Lydia Bennet has run away with Wickham from
Brighton, where his regiment has been encamped and
she has been staying. An avalanche of affliction and
shame has fallen upon the Bennet family, the head of
which now sees with anguish how faulty he has been in not
looking to the conduct of his wife and daughters. This
seems a fatal blow. To Darcy's personal fastidiousness
and family pride the Bennet connection will now be
more intolerable than ever. The contrary is the result.
Darcy's pride has been thoroughly subdued by love,
and the disaster which has befallen the family of the
object of his attachment only serves to call forth the
deeper and nobler part of his character. Without dis-
closing his intentions he hastens to London, where
Wickham and Lydia have concealed themselves, uses his
knowledge of Wickham 's previous connections and
habits to discover their hiding-place, persuades Wick-
ham to make Lydia an honest woman, pays his debts,
undertakes to buy him a commission, and, to crown all,
bows his pride so far as to be present at the marriage.
All this he does, without letting the Bennets know it,
78 LIFE OF
unaer cover of Mr. Gardiner's name, but the truth is
revealed to Ehzabeth by Lydia, and produces its natural
impression on her mind. Rumours having reached Lady
Catherine de Bourgh of an engagement between her
nephew and Ehzabeth, that dragonness comes thunder-
ing to Longbourn, pounces on Elizabeth, draws her to a
private interview, and threatens the daring girl with her
high displeasure if she presumes to think of the hand of
the man destined for Miss de Bourgh. Elizabeth com-
ports herself with firmness and discretion, and Lady
Catherine seals the doom of her own ambition by
reporting to Darcy that Elizabeth had refused to
renounce him. After this all goes smoothly. Lirst
Bingley proposes to Jane. Then Darcy proposes to
Elizabeth in a strain very different from that in which
he made his first offer. The curtain falls amidst the
comical transports of Mrs. Bennet over the marriage
of three daughters, and Mr. Bennet, after giving his
consent in his library to the marriage of Elizabeth with
Darcy, only remarks that if there are other young men
who want to marry his daughters, he is at leisure and
they may come in.
Lord Brabourne says that Darcy is the only one of his
great-aunt's heroes for whom he feels much regard.
Darcy's character has certainly more than any other in
the set the " intricacy " which Jane Austen thought the
great source of interest. Underlying his unamiable
exterior, he has generous qualities which his love of
Elizabeth brings out ; and that her first rejection of
him, instead of estranging, cures him of his pride is a
proof of the real depth and nobleness of his character.
JANE A USTEN. 79
His pride and self-love, however, in the early scenes are
somewhat overdone. No well-bred man would behave
as he does in the Meryton ball-room. Nobody but a
puppy would reply when he was asked to let himself be
introduced to a young lady, "She is tolerable, but not
handsome enough to tempt me ; and I am in no humour
at present to give consequence to young ladies who are
slighted by other men." No man of sense would say of
himself, especially to a woman with whom he had only
just become acquainted, "I have faults enough, but they
are not, I hope, of the understanding. My temper I dare
not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding — cer-
tainly too little for the convenience of the world. I
cannot forget the follies and vices of others as soon as I
ought, nor their offences against myself. My feelings
are not puffed about with every attempt to move them.
My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good
opinion once lost is lost for ever." Such might be the
thoughts of a man brought up in isolation by an idolizing
household and with exaggerated ideas of his personal
and family consequence, and they might reveal them-
selves in his conduct, but they would not escape his
lips.
Of the minor characters by far the most amusing is
Mr. Collins, with his solemn priggishness and his
worship of his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Most exquisite is the scene in which he makes Elizabeth
an offer of his hand.
" Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as soon as they were
gone Mr. Collins began.
80 LIFE OF
" ' Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far
from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections.
You would have been less amiable in my eyes had there not been
this little unwillingness ; but allow me to assure you, that I have
your respected mother's permission, for this address. You can
hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural
delicacy may lead you to dissemble ; my attentions have been too
marked to be mistaken. Almost as soon as I entered the house, I
singled you out as the companion of my future life. But before I
am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it will be
advisable for me to state my reasons for manning — and moreover
for coming into Hertfordshire with the design of selecting a wife, as
I certainly did.'
"The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being
run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing,
that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to
stop him farther, and he continued : —
" ' My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing
for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the
example of matrimony in his parish ; secondly, that I am convinced
it will add very greatly to my happiness ; and thirdly — which per-
haps I ought to have mentioned earlier — that it is the particular
advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have
the honour of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to
give me her opinion (unasked too !) on this subject ; and it was but
the very Saturday night before I left llunsford — between our pools
at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh's
footstool, that she said, "Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergy-
man like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman
for my sake ; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of
person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a
good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you
can, bring her to llunsford, and I will visit her." Allow me, by the
way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and
kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the
advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond
anything I can describe ; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must
be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and
JANE A USTEN. 81
respect which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my
general intention in favour of matrimony ; it remains to be told why
my views were directed to Longbourn instead of my own neigh-
bourhood, where I assure you there are many amiable young women.
But the fact is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the
death of your honoured father (who, however, may live many years
longer), I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a
wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as
little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place — which,
however, as I have already said, may not be for several years. This
has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I flatter myself it will not
sink me in your esteem. And now nothing remains for me but to
assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my
affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and I shall make
no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware
that it could not be complied with ; and that one thousand pounds
in the Four Per Cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's
decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head,
therefore, I shall be uniformly silent ; and you may assure yourself
that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are
married.'
" It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.
" ' You are too hasty, sir,' she cried. ' You forget that I have
made no answer. Let me do it without further loss of time.
Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am
very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible
for me to do otherwise than decline them.'
" ' I ani not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal
wave of the hand, ' that it is usual with young ladies to reject the
addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he
first applies for their favour ; and that sometimes the refusal is
repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no
means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to
lead you to the altar ere long.'
" ' Upon my word, sir,' cried Elizabeth, ' your hope is rather an
extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I am
not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who
are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked
82 LIFE OF
a second time. I am "perfectly serious in my refusal. You could
not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman
in the world who would make you so. Nay, were your friend Lady
Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she would find me in every
respect ill-cjualified for the situation.'
"'Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so,' said
Mr. Collins very gravely — ' but I cannot imagine that her ladyship
would at all disapprove of you. And you may be certain that
when I have the honour of seeing her again, I shall speak in
the highest terms of your modesty, economy, and other amiable
qualifications.'
'"Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary.
You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the com-
pliment of believing what I say. I wish you very happy and very
rich, and by refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your
being otherwise. In making me the offer, you must have satisfied
the delicacy of your feelings with regard to my family, and may
take possession of Longbourn estate whenever it falls, without any
self-reproach. This matter may be considered, therefore, as finally
settled.' And rising as she thus spoke, she would have quitted the
room, had not Mr. Collins thus addressed her :
" ' When I do myself the honour of speaking to you next on this
subject, I shall hope to receive a more favourable answer than you
have now given me ; though I am far from accusing you of cruelty
at present, because I know it to be the established custom of your
sex to reject a man on the first application, and perhaps you have
even now said as much to encourage my suit as would be consistent
with the true delicacy of the female character.'
'"Really, Mr. Collins,' cried Eliz.abeth, with some warmth,
'you puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can
appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to
express my refusal in such a way as may convince you of its
being one.'
" ' You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that
your refusal of my addresses arc merely words of course. My
reasons for believing it .are briefly these : — It does not appear to me
that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment
I can offer would be any other than highly desirable. My situation
JANE AUSTEN. 83
in life, my connections with the family of De Bourgh, and my
relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favour ;
and you should take it into further consideration, that in spite of
your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another
offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily
so small, that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your love-
liness and amiable qualifications. As I must therefore conclude
that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to
attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspt nse, accord-
ing to the usual practice of elegant females.'
" ' I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretension whatever to
that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable
man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed to
be sincere. I thank you again and again for the honour you have
done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impos-
sible. My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer?
Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to
plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from
her heart.'
" ' You are uniformly charming ! ' cried he, with an air of awk-
ward gallantry ; ' and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the
express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will
not fail of being acceptable.' "
Charming, too, is Mr. Collins's letter of condolence
to Mr. Bennet on the distress and disgrace which had
been brought on the Longbourn family by Lydia's elope-
ment with Wickham.
" My dear Sir, — I feel myself called upon, by our relation-
ship, and my situation in life, to condole with you on the grievous
affliction you are now suffering under, of which we were yesterday
informed by a letter from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir,
that Mrs. Collins and myself sincerely sympathize with you, and
all your respectable family, in your present distress, which must be
of the bitterest kind, because proceeding from a cause which no
time can remove. No arguments shall be wanting on my part
84 LIFE OF
that can alleviate so severe a misfortune — or that may comfort you,
under a circumstance that must be of all others most afflicting to a
parent's mind. The death of your daughter would have been a
blessing in comjiarison of this. And it is the more to be lamented,
because there is reason to suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs
me, that this licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has pro-
ceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence ; though, at the same
time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined
to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she
could not be guilty of such an enormity at so early an age. How-
soever that may be, you are grievously to be pitied ; in which
opinion I am not only joined by Mrs. Collins, but likewise by Lady
Catherine and her daughter, to whom I have related the affair.
They agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one
daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others ; for who,
as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says, will connect them-
selves with such a family? And this consideration leads me more-
over to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain event of
last November ; for had it been otherwise, I must have been
involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. Let me advise you then,
my dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off
your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to
reap the fruits of her own heinous offence.
" I am, dear Sir, t^c, &c."
Mr. Collins has been justly described as the repre-
sentative, under a somewhat altered form, of tlic servile
domestic chaplain of the seventeenth century. He was
a possible character in Jane Austen's day. Perhaps a
vestige of him might be found even now.
Mr. Bennet's dry humour is another great source of
fun. The scene in which he tantalizes his wife and
daughters about calling at Nelherfield is a happy opening
of the talc. " Lizzy," he says to his daughter, when her
opinion has turned out wiser than his own, " I bear you
no ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last
JANE AUSTEN. 85
May, which, considering the event, shows some greatness
of mind." His wife says plaintively that after his death
she will be turned out of her house by Mr. Collins as the
heir in tail, " My dear," he replies, " do not give way to
such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things.
Let us flatter ourselves that / may be the survivor." He
is excellent in playing off Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins asks
whether Miss de Bourgh has been presented.
" ' I do not remember her name among the ladies at Court.'
" ' Ilcr iudilFerent state of health unhappily prevents her being in
town; and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine myself one day,
has deprived the British court of its brightest ornament. Her lady-
ship seemed pleased with the idea ; and you may imagine that I am
happy on every occasion to offer those little delicate compliments
which are always acceptable to ladies. I have more than once
observed to Lady Catherine, that her charming daughter seemed
born to be a duchess, and that the most elevated rank, instead of
giving her consequence, would be adorned by her. — These are the
kind of little things that please her ladyship, and it is a sort of
attention which I consider myself peculiarly bound to pay.'
" ' You judge very properly,' said Mr. Bennet, ' and it is happy
for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May
I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of
the moment, or are the result of previous study ? '
" ' They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and
though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging
such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary
occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as
possible. '
"Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin
was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the
keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute
composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at
Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure."
Nor, the man's character being a compound of sense and
86 LIFE OF
weakness, is there anything unnatural in his having been
caught by a pretty face, and married a woman who
cannot be a companion to him, and from whose folly
and vulgarity he has to take refuge in his books. If she
was lively and forward, he, being shy and a recluse,
would probably .be cauglit with ease. Certainly Mrs.
Ecnnet is an extreme example of her class, and her
silliness does sometimes verge pretty closely on idiocy,
as when she flies into an ecstasy of delight over the by-
no-means triumphal marriage of Lydia with Wickham,
and fancies that they will take one of the great houses in
the neighbourhood. She says amusing things, however,
in her way. " I do think Mrs. Long is as good a
creature as ever lived — and her nieces are very pretty
behaved girls, and not at all handsome. I like them
prodigiously."
I'here is no saying exactly what persons of quality may
have done in Lady Catherine de Bourgh's day. But in
these days her autocracy would be difticult, and her
dictatorial insolence would scarcely escajje a fall. Her
sudden descent with all her terrors to prevent Darcy's
marriage is too much for our belief. The basis of the
character, however, is natural enough; and the dinner-
party at Rosings, with Mr. Collins acting as hierophant,
is very good fun. After all, the features of a comic mask
must be a little exaggerated for the stage.
A notable though very subordinate character is
Charlotte Lucas. She is a good sensible girl, worthy to
be Elizabeth's friend. But she is made the vehicle of
the most coarsely practical view of matrimony as a pro-
vision for a young woman. " I am not romantic," she
JANE AUSTEN. 87
says ; " I never was. I ask only a comfortable home,
and considering Mr. Collins's character, connections,
and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of
happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast in
entering the marriage state." Accordingly, when Eh'^a-
beth has refused Mr. Collins, Charlotte accepts him
without the slightest hesitation. Mr. Collins, to be sure,
was neither sensible nor agreeable ; his society was irk-
some, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But
still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly
either of men or of matrimony, marriage liad always
been her object ; it was the only honourable provision
for educated women of small fortune, and however un-
certain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest
"preservation from want." In Charlotte's philosophy
" happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known
to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not
advance their felicity in the least. They always continue
to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards, to have their share
of vexations, and it is better to know as little as possible
of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass
your life." What is the result of Charlotte Lucas's
practical application of her own theory? It is such as to
indicate that Jane Austen herself was unromantic, but at
the same time was very far from taking the same view of
marriage as Charlotte Lucas. When Elizabeth visits the
Collinses in their home, she finds it fitted up and arranged
with a neatness and consistency of which she gives
Charlotte all the credit. " When Mr. Collins could be
forgotten, there was really a great air of comfort through-
88 LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN.
out, and by Charlotce's evident enjoyment of it Elizabeth
supposed he must be often forgotten." Charlotte has
chosen her sitting-room at the back of the house, because
if it had a livelier look-out Mr. Collins would be too
much there, and she encourages his taste for gardening
to relieve herself of his society. No denunciation of
mercenary marriage or effusion of romantic sentiment
could have taught us more effectively that Charlotte's
counsels are not counsels of perfection. Yet under the
same conditions, probably, the same measure of imperfect
happiness has often been enjoyed. Besides, Charlotte
could not choose her children from worldly motives.
If she became a mother, her state may have been not
only happier but higher as Mrs. Collins than it could
have been had she remained unmarried.
CHAPTER III.
" O ENSE and Sensibility " is a companion to " Pride
w3 and Prejudice," running somewhat in the same
line of invention as well as corresponding in title, but
inferior. To suppose that the sisters Jane and Cass-
andra Austen appear as characters in Jane's novels is
absurd. But their affection turned Jane's thoughts as a
novehst in the direction of sisterly love. We had a
pair of sisters in "Pride and Prejudice;" we have
another pair in " Sense and Sensibility." Ehnor who
is Sense, Marianne who is Sensibility, and Margaret
who is a cypher, are the daughters of Mrs. Dashwood,
the second wife of a gentleman who at his death
bequeathed them all to the generosity of his son by
his first wife, and the heir of the estate, Mr. John
Dashwood. The generosity of Mr. John Dashwood is
very limited, while that of his wife, who governs him, is
still more so. Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters leave
their old home and go to live in Devonshire, where Sir
John Middleton, an old friend, has provided them with
a cottage close to his own place. Elinor carries with
her an attachment, verging apparently on an engagement,
to Edward Ferrars, son of the wealthy, ambitious, and
90 LIFE OB
hard-hearted Mrs. Ferrars, and brother of Mrs. John
Dashwood, a young man for whom his friends have
formed great hopes of distinction, whicli he has neither
the force nor the desire to fulfil. Marianne finds a
lover in AVilloughby, a young man who reminds us of
Wickham in "Pride and Prejudice," both in his power
of fascination and in his want of principle. Into
^Villoughby's arms she rushes with the impulsive in-
discretion of a wildly romantic, sentimental, and en-
thusiastic girl. Her lover is dependent on the favour
of a wealthy relative, Mrs. Smith, as Edward Ferrars
is on that of his mother. Another man, and a far
worthier, at the same time feels the charms of
Marianne's beauty and of her warm and affectionate
disposition. But Colonel Brandon is thirty-seven, and
wears flannel waistcoats. Moreover, he has loved
before, and the romantic Marianne cannot conceive
the possibility of a second love.
Willoughby is Colonel Brandon's enemy, and tries to
jirejudice the sisters against him with the same wilfulness
with which Wickham laboured to prejudice Elizabeth
against Darcy.
"'Miss Dashwood,' cried Willoughby, 'you are now using me
unkindly. You are endeavouring to disarm me by reason, and to
convince me against my will. But it will not do. You shall liiid
me as stubborn as you can be artful. 1 have three unanswerable
reasons for disliking Colonel Ihandon : he has threatened me with
rain when I wanted it to be fine ; he has found fault with the
hanging i^A my curricle ; and I cannot persuade him to buy my
brown mare. If it will be any satisfaction to you, however, to be
told, that I believe his character to be in other respects irreproach-
able, I am ready to confess it. And in return for an acknowledg-
JANE AUSTEN. 91
ment which must give me some pain, you cannot deny me the
privilege of dislilving him as much as ever.'"
The scene is partly at the Cottage, partly at the house
of Sir John Middleton, who is very fond of company,
of match-making, and of rather coarse jokes. It is at
Sir John Middleton's that the sisters meet Colonel
Brandon. There also they meet Mrs. Jennings, Sir
John Middleton's mother-in-law, a thoroughly good-
natured though thoroughly vulgar woman, and Lady
Middleton's sister, Mrs. Palmer, with her husband.
I\Irs. Palmer is a lady-like Mrs. Bennet, and her
husband, being very superior to her in sense, feels,
like Mr. Bennet, that he has married beneath him in
intellect, and shows his consciousness of it in a much
less pleasant and amusing way.
Edward Ferrars appears upon the scene, stays for a
week and is very loving, but departs without making a
declaration. There is something mysterious and dis-
quieting about his conduct. Presently the mystery is
cleared up with a vengeance. The two Misses Steele,
relatives of Mrs. Jennings, come to stay with Sir John
Middleton, and the younger of the two. Miss Lucy
Steele, discloses to Elinor in confidence the astounding
fact that she is secretly engaged to Edward Ferrars, who
fell- in love with her when he was very young and while
li\'ing with a private tutor. The bitterness of the revela-
tion is enhanced by the unworthiness of ISIiss Lucy Steele,
who is low-bred, low-minded, illiterate and pert in the
highest degree. The possession of this fatal secret,
with all the pangs and mortification which it entails, is
92 LIFE OF
the sore trial of Elinor's sense and self-control through
which she passes in triumph.
Meanwhile Willoughby, after going the utmost length
short of a declaration in his love-making with Marianne,
after showing her the house which is to be hers, buying
the horse which she is to ride there, and cutting off a
lock of her hair, suddenly takes his departure on a
flimsy pretext, disquieting the sensible Ehnor, though
not the enthusiastic Marianne or the confiding Mrs.
Dashwood. Immediately afterward, Colonel Brandon
is suddenly called away from the house of Sir John
Middleton.
Mrs. Jennings now takes Elinor and Marianne to
town, where Marianne expects to find her Willoughby.
Her Willoughby is there, but instead of rushing to her
feet he keeps aloof, takes no notice of her letters when
she impetuously writes to him, beyond leaving his card,
and almost cuts her when they meet at a ball. She is in
uncontrollable agonies of wounded love, which her more
sensible sister vainly labours to assuage. The crisis
comes when it transpires that Willoughby is about to be
married to another woman, a Miss Grey, with fifty
thousand pounds. He announces his intention to
Marianne in a revoltingly heartless letter. Marianne is
incapable of subduing or disguising her emotions.
Transports of passion more tragical than ever ensue,
while Elinor, with her own sad secret buried in her
heart, displays her self-control and self-devotion to the
highest advantage in supporting and comforting the
weaker vessel. In the picture of Marianne's sufferings,
and in the contrast between her and her sister, Jane
JANE AUSTEN. 93
Austen evidently exerts all her skill and her knowledge
of the female heart. Colonel Brandon now comes in
with a history of Willoughby and an exposure of his
character. Willoughby has seduced a girl in whom
Colonel Brandon had an interest, and whom scandal
called his natural daughter. There has been a duel
between them on the girl's account. But even this
revelation does not cure Marianne. She shows such
want, not only of self-control, but of common sense,
of tact, even of good manners, that we wonder how so
superior a man as Colonel Brandon can wish to have
her as his wife. Her intensely affectionate disposition
(which, however, does not prevent her from ungenerously
misinterpreting her sister's calmness) and her beauty are
the attractions. Wish to have Marianne as his wife,
however. Colonel Brandon does, and of course he
succeeds. A dangerous illness into which she is thrown
by a romantic walk in wet grass with thin shoes is the
turning-point in their joint destiny, and proves the gate
of happiness. Thus " Marianne Dashwood was born to
an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the
falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by
her conduct her most favourite maxims. She was born
to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at
seventeen, and, with no sentiment superior to strong
esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her
hand to another ! — and that other a man who had
suffered no less than herself under the event of a
former attachment, whom two years before she had
considered too old to be married, and who still sought
the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat."
94 LIFE OF
The course of Elinor's true love is also duly brought
back to its channel and made to run smooth to matri-
mony, though by what we cannot help tliinking one of
the strongest measures to which Destiny has ever
resorted, even in a novel. The engagement between
Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele is disclosed l)y the
indiscretion of a waiting-maid. Mrs. Ferrars and Mrs.
John Dashwood, who is a true daughter of her amiable
mother, are thrown into fits of rage. Edward had been
destined for a daughter of Lord Morton with thirty
thousand pounds. As he remains loyal to his lovt
in spite of his mother's reproaches and threats, Mrs.
Ferrars disinherits him, and somewhat precipitately
settles the estate which was intended for him on his
younger brother, Robert, to whom she also thinks of
transferring the hand and fortune of Miss Morton, an
arrangement to which it is assumed that Miss Morton
will readily consent. Heigh presto ! Robert turns
round, and having the property now settled on him, so
that he can defy his mother's wrath, cuts out his brother
in the affection of Lucy Steele and carries her off, she
being nothing loath to exchange her disinherited lover
for one who had become securely possessed of a thou-
sand pounds a year. Edward, his honour being thus
released, happy in his loss, turns at once to his real love.
Overwhelmed, of course, by the second catastroi)he of
her ambition, Mrs. Ferrars partly relents toward P^vdward
and settles on him ten thousand pounds, which, with a
benefice of two hundred and fifty pounds a year given him
by Colonel Brandon, and for the sake of which he takes
Orders, makes a future sufficient for Edward and Elinor
JANE A USTEN. - 95
to marry on. " Between Barton (where Mrs. Dashwood
lived) and Delaford (where both the married couples
lived) there was that constant communication which
strong family affection would naturally dictate; and
among the merits and happiness of Elinor and
Marianne let it not be ranked as the least considerable
that though sisters, and living almost within sight of
each other, they could live without disagreement between
themselves or producing coldness between their hus-
bands." This is one of the passages of Jane Austen's
novels in reading which we must be on our guard
against taking playful irony for cynicism. A member
herself of a most united family, she could not really
think it difficult for two sisters and their husbands to
live near each other without quarrelling.
A strange, not to say extravagant, incident in this tale
is the partial rehabilitation of Willoughby, who, when he
hears that Marianne is dying, posts down from London
to shrive himself to her sister. His explanation is that
he really was desperately in love with Marianne, but
that having forfeited the favour of Mrs. Smith by his
profligacy, he found it, with his habits of expenditure
and his debts, absolutely necessary to marry for money.
He speaks odiously of his wife, though it does not
appear that she had married him for anything but love,
and imputes to her dictation his heartless and ungentle-
manly letter. To the male apprehension nothing could
be more unsatisfactory than this defence ; but if we may
trust Jane Austen, the female mind is, or was in those
days, very forgiving to sincere passion, even if it failed
in constancy. The assurance that Willoughby had not
96 LIFE OF
been trifling with Marianne's affection, but had really
been over head and ears in love with her, and had been
miserable at losing her, appears to relieve him of a load
of guilt. It seems, too, that we have the same authority
for believing that even when all is over between two
lovers, a regard for the man's character still lingers in
the woman's breast, and she feels a satisfaction in
learning that he was not unworthy of her love. To the
Mrs, Willoughby who has supplanted her apparently she
is ruthless. It will be observed that in the case of
Willoughby, as in that of Wickham, Jane Austen is
merciful to the sinner and saves him from final
perdition.
Jane Austen never fails to show great store of observa-
tion and invention in her minor characters, and in the
relations, similarities, and contrasts between them. Mrs.
Jennings is one of a kind which she is very fond of
painting, with a good and a bad side — vulgar and rattling
as she can be, a thoroughpaced matchmaker and gossip,
and capable of recommending a glass of particularly old
and fine constantia as a cordial for a wounded heart ;
yet with the best of natures, untiring in her kindness,
and right in her sympathies. Sir John Middleton, with
his profuse and boisterous hospitality, his good humour,
his illiteracy, and his coarse jokes, is half-way between
Squire Western and the country gentleman of the
present day. He goes to London, which Squire
Western did not ; but the metropolis is to him a crowd
of company in which he noisily revels untouched by
the intellect or the polish. When he is asked to
describe Willoughby, he says that he is a bold rider and
JANE A USTEN. 97
a very decent shot. Further questioned by the eager
and indignant Marianne as to the young man's manners,
acquaintances, pursuits, talents, and genius, he is
puzzled. "I don't know much about him," he says,
"as to all that. But he is a pleasant, good-humoured
fellow, and has got the nicest black bitch of a pointer I
ever saw. Was she out with him to day ? " On hearing
of Willoughby"s treachery he vows that he " could not
speak another word to him, meet him where he might,
for all the world. No, not if it were to be by the side of
Barton covert, and they were kept waiting for two hours
together. Such a scoundrel of a fellow, such a deceitful
dog ! It was only the last time they met that he had
offered him one of Folly's puppies, and this was the end
of it!"
Lady Middleton and Mrs. John Dashwood are touched
off together. " Lady Middleton was equally pleased
with Mrs. Dashwood. There was a kind of cold-
hearted selfishness on both sides which naturally
attracted them, and they sympathized with each other
in an insipid propriety of demeanour and a general
want of understanding." Lady Middleton, however,
gets her due. In her calm and polite unconcern,
Elinor finds a relief from the clamorous kindness and
intrusive curiosity of others, and " as every qualification
is raised at times by the circumstances of the moment
to more than its real value," the afilicted soul is some-
times " worried by othcious condolence into rating good
breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good
nature." Evidently Jane's own sense of the value of
good breeding was keen. The case in which she shows
7
98 LIFE OF
no mercy is that of the Misses Steele, vulgar alike in
manners and in soul, obtrusive and malicious at the
same time.
One of the best bits of " miniature painting " in the
tale is the scene at the opening, where Mr. and Mrs.
John Dashwood, having come in for great wealth,
debate the duty of fulfilling the late Mr. Dashwood's
dying injunction to do something for his widow and
daughters. Mr. John Dashwood thinks of giving them
three thousand pounds. His wife protests against his
*' ruining himself and their poor little Harry by giving
away half his money to his half-sisters." This brings it
down to five hundred pounds apiece. From five hun-
dred pounds apiece it comes down to a small annuity
for the widow. But annuities are so objectionable !
" ' To be sure,' said she, ' it is Letter than parting with fifteen
hundred pounds at once. But then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live
fifteen years, we shall be completely taken in.'
" ' Fifteen years ! my dear Fanny ; her life cannot be worth half
that purchase.'
" ' Certainly not ; but if you observe, people always live for ever
when there is any annuity to be paid them ; and she is very stout
and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious busi-
ness ; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid
of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a
great deal of the trouble of annuities ; for my mother was clogged
with the payment of three old superannuated servants by my father's
will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. Twice every
year these annuities were to be paid ; and then there was the
trouble of getting it to them ; and then one of them was said to
have died, and afterwards it turned out no such thing. My mother
was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with
such perpetual claims ou il ; and it was more unkind in my father,
JANE A USTEN. 99
because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my
mother's disposal, without any restrictions whatever. It has given
me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I would not pin
myself down to the payment of one for all the world.'
" ' It is certainly an unpleasant thing,' replied Mr. Dashwood, * to
have those kind of yearly drains on one's income. One's fortune, as
your mother justly says, is not one's own. To be tied down to the
regular payment of such a sum, on every rent day, is by no means
desirable : it takes away one's independence.'
" ' Undoubtedly; and after all you have no thanks for it. They
think themselves secure, you do no more than what is expected,
and it raises no gratitude at all. If I were you, whatever I did
should be done at my own discretion entirely. I would not bind
myself to allow them anything yearly. It may be very inconvenient
some years to spare a hundred, or even fifty pounds, from our own
expenses.' "
An occasional present of a little money, Mr, John
Dashwood opines, will be much better. But his wife
convinces him by degrees that his father did not mean
money at all, but only general acts of kindness, such as
looking out for a house for them, and sending them
presents of fish and game. Even to a present of
furniture her selfishness finds plausible objections. Her
clinching argument is, that the late Mr. Dashwood would
have left everything to the widow and daughters if he
could. This is irresistible, and Mr. John Dashwood
resolves "that it would be absolutely unnecessary, if
not highly indecorous, to do more for the widow and
children of his father than such sort of neighbourly acts
as his wife pointed out."
Jane Austen, as we have seen, was remarkable for her
love of children and her power of winning their hearts.
But in this novel there are two or three passages which
100 LIFE OF
seem to show that the noise and rudeness of spoilt
children had sometimes made her wince.
" Fortunately for thoie who pay their couit through such foibles
a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the
most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous ;
her demands are exorbitant ; but she will swallow anything ; and
the excessive affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards
her offspring, were viewed therefore by Lady Middleton without llie
smallest surprise or distrust. She saw with maternal ct)mplaccncy
all the impertinent encroachments and mischievous tricks to which
her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair
jndled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives
and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal
enjoyment. It suggested no other surprise than that Elinor and
Marianne should sit so composedly by without claiming a share in
what was passing.
" ' John is in such spirits to-day ! ' said she, on his taking Miss
Steele's pocket-handkerchief, and throwing it out of window. ' He
is full of monkey tricks.'
" And soon afterwards, on the second boy's violently pinching
one of the same lady's fingers, she fondly observed, ' How playful
William is ! '
" ' And here is my sweet little Anna-Maria,' she added, tenderly
caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise
for the last two minutes ; ' and she is always so gentle and quiet —
never was there such a quiet little thing !'
"But unfortunately, in bestowing these embraces, a pin iu her
ladyship's head-dress slightly scratching the child's neck, ])roduced
from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams as could liardly
be outdime by any creature professedly noisy.
"The mother's consternation was excessive; but it could not
surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and everything was dune by
all three, in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest
as likely to assuage the agonies of tlie little sufferer. She was
seated in her mother's lap, covered with kisses, her wound bathed
with lavender-water by one of the Miss Steeles, who was on her
JANE A USTEN. 101
knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar-plums by the
other.
" With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease
crying. She still screamed and sobbed lustily, kicked her two
brothers for offeiing to touch her, and all their united soothings
were ineffectual till Lady Middleton luckily remembering that in a
scene of similar distress, last week, some apricot marmalade had
been successfully applied for a bruised temple, the same remedy was
eagerly proposed for this unfortunate scratch, and a slight intermis-
sion of screams in the young lady on hearing it, gave them reason
to hope that it would not be rejected. She was carried out of the
room, therefore, in her mother's arms, in quest of this medicine,
and as the two boys chose to follow, though earnestly entreated by
their mother to stay behind, the four young ladies were left in a
quietness which the room had not known for many hours."
" Sense and Sensibility" runs, as has been already said,
a good deal on the same lines of invention as " Pride and
Prejudice," the parallel between Willoughby and Wickham
being not less obvious than that between the two pairs
of sisters. But if its writer in giving it to the world
before "Pride and Prejudice," when both were ready
for publication, thought it the better work of the two,
she was an instance of the errors to which authors are
liable in estimating their own works.
CHAPTER IV.
THE reader who would thoroughly enjoy "North-
anger Abbey " must renew or make acquaintance
with Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," the
paragon of the class of romantic and sentimental novels
at that time in the hands of young ladies.
" ' But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with your-
sclf all this morning ? Have you gone on with Udolpho ? '
'* ' Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke ; and I am got
to the black veil.'
"'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell
you what is behind the black veil for the world ! Arc you not wild
to know?'
" ' Oh ! yes, quite ; what can it be ? But do not tell me : I would
not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton ; I am
sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh ! I am delighted with the
book ! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure
you ; if it had nc^t been to meet you, I would not have come away
from it for all the world.'
" ' Dear creature 1 how much I am obliged to you ; and when you
have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together ; and I
have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for
you.'
" ' Have you, indeed ! How glad I am ! What are they all ?'
" 'I will rend you their names directly; here they are in my
LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN. 103
pocket-book. " Castle of Wolfenbach,'' " Clermont," " Mysterious
Warnings," " Necromancer of the Black Forest," "Midnight Bell,"
" Orphan of the Rhine," and " Horrid Mysteries." Those will last
us some time.'
" 'Yes ; pretty well ; but are they all horrid ? Are you sure they
are all horrid ? '
" ' Yes, quite sure ; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world,
has read every one of them.' "
"Northanger Abbey" is partly a quiz on the "Mysteries
of Udolpho." It has its comic counterparts to the
romantic and spectre-haunted castle, to the terrible and
cruel Montoni, to the dark fate of Laurentina and the
adventure of the mysterious black veil. In the course
of it, a high compliment is paid to Mrs. Radcliffe, yet
Mrs. Radcliffe would perhaps have preferred that
" Northanger Abbey " should remain in the drawer of
the unappreciative publisher, to which, as we have seen,
it was long consigned.
Catherine Morland is described as setting out with
comical disqualifications for the part of a heroine of
romance.
" No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy
would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in
life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and
disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergy-
man, without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man,
though his name was Richard, and he had never been handsome.
He had a considerable independence, besides two good livings, and
he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her
mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and,
what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three
sons before Catherine was born ; and, instead of dying in bringing
104 LIFE OF
the latter into the world, as anyhody might expect, she still liver! on
— lived to have six children nujre — to see them growing up around
her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children
will be always called a fine family, where there arc heads, and arms,
and legs enough for the number ; but the Morlands had little other
right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine,
for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward
figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong
features ; so much for her person, and not less unpropitious for
heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boys' plays, and
greatly preferred cricket, not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic
enjoyments of infancy, nuBsing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird,
or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden, and
if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of
mischief, at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring
those which .she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities ;
her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or
understand anything before she was taught, and sometimes not even
then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her
mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the
'Beggar's Petition,' and, after all, her next sister Sally could say
it better than .she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid ; by
no means, she learned the fable of ' The I fare and many Friends '
as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn
music ; and Cathciine was sure she should like it, for she was very
fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet, so at eight years
old she began. She learned a year and could not bear it ; and Mrs.
Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished
in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day
which dismissed the music-master was one of the hajipiest of
Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though
whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother,
or seize upon any other odd piece of jiapcr, she did what she could in
that way by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very
much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her
father ; French by her mother. Her proficiency in cither was not
remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could.
Wiiat a strange unaccountable character ! for with all these
symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bail heart
JANE AUSTEN. 105
nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome,
and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny.
She was, moreover, noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanli-
ness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the
green slope at the back of the house."
Yet a heroine Catherine Morland is to be. At fifteen
appearances mend. Catherine begins to curl her hair
and long for balls, while her looks improve so much that
she hears herself called almost pretty. From fifteen to
seventeen slie trains herself for the part by filling her
imagination with poetry and novels ; and though the
situation is not promising, the village supplying no
materials for romance, not a single young man whose
origin is unknown, a heroine's destiny is not to be
baffled. Mr. Allen, the chief proprietor of the neigh-
bourhood, and a friend of the family, is going to Bath for
his gout, and his good-natured wife takes Catherine with
her. So Catherine sets out on her adventures. Mrs.
Morland's parting advice to her daughter is, not to be
on her guard against the violence of noblemen who
would run away with her, but to wrap up warm and
keep accounts.
We have now a picture of Bath as it was when the
spirit of Beau Nash still lingered there, when the com-
pany which thronged the queen of watering-places had
not lost its unity, but assembled regularly every evening
in the Rooms under the presidency of the master of
ceremonies to dance, promenade, play whist, flirt,
display its dresses, and exhibit its varieties of character.
Mrs. Allen and Catherine at first find themselves alone
in the crowd, but presently they light on Mrs. Thorpe,
106 LIFE OF
an old friend of Mrs. Allen, With Mrs. Thorpe is her
daughter Isabella, a beauty, and full of gushing senti-
ment, but vulgar-minded, heartless, and designing, with
whom Catherine at once strikes up a bosom friendship,
and enters into a partnership of novel reading. The
party is joined by Catherine's brother James, and
Isabella's brother John, who are college friends. James
is engaged to Isabella, and is a good fellow. John is a
specimen of a class not yet extinct. He is " a stout
young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face
and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too hand-
some unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too
much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he
ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be
allowed to be easy. He is a fast man, or a would-be
fast man, and a blackguard, always talking horse, always
swearing, a braggart withal and a liar. Having, as he
fancies, elicited from Catherine Morland that she is the
destined heiress of Mr. Allen, he makes up to her,
takes her on expeditions in which his character as a
man and a Jehu is displayed with results highly comical,
but embarrassing to the lady. The name of Blaize
Castle, the show place at Clifton, which she imagines to
be a castle of romance, exercises a powerful influence
on Catherine's fancy, and leads her astray from the path
of strict social rectitude. Meanwhile she has been intro-
duced to a gentleman to whom the blackguard Thorpe
serves as a foil. This is the good-looking, well-bred,
and eminently sensible and witty Mr. Henry Tilney,
a young clergyman, the son of General Tilney, a
Gloucestershire magnate. She has at the same time
JANE A US TEN. 107
formed the acquaintance of Mr. Henry Tilney's sister,
the excellent and amiable Eleanor. Henry Tilney does
not fall in love with her, but he is attracted by the
simplicity of her character, beneath which lie right
feeling and good sense. He amuses himself by talking
to her and making fun of her in a good-natured way.
Her feelings are much in advance of his. She admires
him intensely, though in her humility she scarcely dares
aspire to his love.
Now General Tilney appears upon the scene. He is
a most imposing personage, eminently handsome, stately
in deportment, and perfectly well-bred ; but a tyrant of
whose temper his family and all about him stand in
awe, full of his own consequence, and greedy and
grasping at the same time. He is in short the Montoni
of this comic version of the " Mysteries of Udolpho."
Becoming acquainted through his son and daughter
with Catherine, the great man is surprisingly and over-
whelmingly polite, though in the midst of his most
elaborate attentions she feels the chill which he casts
over all around him, and which extends even to her
intercourse with his son and daughter in his presence.
When the Aliens leave Bath he invites her to stay with
him at his seat in Gloucestershire, Northanger Abbey.
An abbey and the home of Henry Tilney ! The com-
bination is too enchanting, for the name Abbey at once
conjures up visions of dark cloisters, subterranean
passages, ruined chapels and cells haunted by legends
of ill-fated nuns. For Northanger Abbey the party set
out in great state, with the General's carriage and four
and outriders. At starting the General is so incensed at
108 LIFE OF
finding Catherine incommoded by the packages which
have been stowed into the carriage, that her new writing-
desk narrowly escapes being thrown into the street.
After the first stage she is transferred from the state
carriage to the box of a curricle by the side of Henry
Tilney, who amuses himself with exciting her fancy
about the Abbey.
" ' You have formed a very favouralile idea of the alihey.'
" ' To be sure I have. Is not it a fine old place, just like what
one reads about ? '
" ' And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a
building such as "what one reads about " may produce? Have
.you a stout heart ? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry ? '
" ' Oh ! yes, I do not tliink I should be easily frightened, because
there would be so many people in the house ; and besides, it has
never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the
family come back to it unawares, without giving any notice, as
generally happens.'
" ' No, certainly. We shall not have to explore our way into a
hall dimly lighted liy the expiring embers of a wood fire, nor be
oliliged to si)read our beds on the floor of a room without windows,
doors, or furniture. But you must be aware that when a young
lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind,
she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they
snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally con-
ducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase,
and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used
since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can
you stand such a ceremony as this ? Will not your mind misgive
you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber, too lofty and
extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take
in its size, its walls hung wiih tapestry exhibiting figures as large
as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting
even a fimcreal appearance ? Will not your heart sink witiiin you? '
" ' Oil ! but this will not happen to me, I am sure.'
"' I low fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apart-
JANE AUSTEN. 109
ment? And what will you discern? Not tables, toilettes, ward-
robes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps the remains of a broken
lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts can open, and
over the fireplace the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose
features will so incomprehensibly strilce you, that you will not be
able to withdraw your eyes from it. Dorothy, meanwhile, no less
struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and
drops a few unintelligible hints. To raise your spirits, moreover,
she gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you in-
habit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that you will not
have a single domestic within call. With this parting cordial, she
courtesies off: you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as
long as the last echo can reach you : and when, with fainting spirits,
you attempt to fasten your door, you discover, with increased alarm,
that it has no lock.'
" ' Oh ! Mr. Tilney, how frightful. This is just like a book !
But it cannot really happen to me. I am sure your housekeeper is
not really Dorothy. Well, what then ? '
" ' Nothing further to alarm, perhaps, may occur the first niglit.
After surmounting your unconquerable horror of the bed, yOu will
retire to rest, and get a few hours' unquiet slumber. But on the
second, or at farthest the third night after your arrival, you will
probably have a violent storm. Peals of thunder so loud as to seem
to shake the edifice to its foundation will roll round the neighbouring
mountains; and during the frightful gusts of wind which accompany
it, you will probably think you discern (for your lanii^ is not extin-
guished) one part of the hanging more violently agitated than the
rest. Unable of course to repress your curiosity in so favourable a
moment for indulging it, you will instantly arise, and, throwing your
dressing-gown around you, proceed to examine this mystery. After
a very short search, you will discover a division in the tapestry so
artfully constructed as to defy the minutest inspection, and on opening
it, a door will immediately appear, which door being only secured
by massy bars and a padlock, you will, after a few efforts, succeed
in opening, and, with your lamp in your hand, will pass through it
into a small vaulted room.'
" ' No, indeed ; I should be too much frightened to do any such
thing.'
110 LIFE OF
" ' What ! not when Dotolhy has given you to understand that
there is a secret subterraneous communication between your apart-
ment and the chapel of St. Anthony, scarcely two miles off. Could
you shiink from so simple an adventure? No, no; you will proceed
into this small vaulted room, and through this into several others,
without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one,
perhaps, there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood,
and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture ; but there
being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp
being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apart-
ment. In repassing through the small vaulted room, however, your
eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony
and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before,
you had passed unnoticed. Impelled by an irresistible presenti-
ment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and
search into every drawer ; but for some time without discovering
anything of importance ; perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard
of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an
inner apartment will open, a roll of paper appears, you seize it — it
contains many sheets of manuscript : you hasten with the precious
treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to
decipher, " Oh thou, whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands
these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall," when your lamp
suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness.' "
The Abbey turns out to be a mansion thoroughly
modernized and improved to the highest pitch by the
General's judicious energy. Still it is on the site of an
abbey, it bears the name, it even embodies some parts
of the old buildings. There is food in it yet for an
excited imagination. Catherine finds herself in a bed-
room unromantically comfortable. Eut her eye is met
by a large cedar chest, curiously inlaid, with handles
of silver, broken, perhaps, by some strange violence,
and with a mysterious cypher on the lid. She cannot
resist the impulse to look into it ; with trembling hand
JANE AUSTEN. Ill
she raises the hd, finds that it contains a white cotton
counterpane, is caught in the act by Miss Tihiey, and
provokes the General into a momentary revelation of
the martinet by being some minutes late for dinner.
The evening passes without further disturbance, and, in
the occasional absence of General Tilney, with much
positive cheerfulness. The hour for retiring comes.
The night is stormy. Catherine, as she crosses the hall,
listens to the tempest with awe, and when she hears it
rage round a corner of the ancient building and slam a
distant door, she feels indeed that she is in an abbey.
She screws up her courage, however ; persuades herself
that she is quite safe and has nothing to fear from
midnight assassins or ravishers, that Henry Tilney could
only have been in jest, and that if the window curtains
seem in motion it is only the violence of the wind.
She lets her fire go out because to keep it up would be
cowardly, and is stepping into bed when her eye is
caught by a high old-fashioned black cabinet, which she
had not noticed before.
" Henry's words, his description of the ebony cabinet which was
to escape her observation at first, immediately rushed across her ;
and though there could be nothing really in it, there was something
whimsical, it was certainly a very remarkable coincidence ! She
took her candle and looked closely at the cabinet. It was not
absolutely ebony and gold ; but it was Japan, black and yellow
Japan of the handsomest kind ; and as she held her candle, the
yellow had very much the effect of gold.
" The key was in the door, and she had a strange fancy to look
into it ; not, however, with the smallest expectation of finding any-
thing, but it was so very odd, after what Heniy had said. In short,
she could not sleep till she had examined it. So, placing the candle
112 LIFE OF
with great caution on a chair, she seized the key with a very tremu-
lous hand, and tried to turn it ; but it resisted her utmost strcns^th.
Alarmed, but not discouraged, she tried it another way ; a bolt ilew,
and she believed herself successful ; but how strangely mysterious 1
the door was still immovable. She paused a moment in breathless
wonder. The wind roared down the chimney, the rain beat in
torrents against the windows, and everything seemed to speak the
awfulness of her situation. To retire to bed, however, unsatisfied
on such a point, would be vain, since sleep must be impossible with
the consciousness of a cabinet so mysteriously closed in her imme-
diate vicinity. Again, therefore, she appHed herself to the key,
and after moving it in every possible way, for some instants, with
the determined celerity of hope's last effort, the door suddenly
yielded to her hand : her heart leaped with exultation at such a
victory, and having thrown open each folding door, the second being
secured only liy bolts of less wonderful construction than the lock,
though in that her eye could not discern anything unusual, a double
range of small drawers appeared in view, with some larger drawers
above and below them, and in the centre, a small door, closed also
with lock and key, secured in all probability a cavity of importance.
"Catherine's heart beat quick, but her courage did not fail her.
With a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity,
her fingers grasped the handle of a drawer and drew it forth. It
was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she
seized a second, a third, a fourth^each was equally empty. Not
one was left unsearched, and in not one was anything found. Well
read in the art of concealing a treasure, the possibihty of false
linings to the drawers did not escape her, and she felt round each
with anxious acuteness in vain. The place in the middle alone
remained now unexplored ; and though she had ' never from the
first had the smallest idea of finding anything in any part of the
cabinet, and was not in the least disappointed at her ill success
thus far, it would be foolish not to examine it thoroughly while she
was about it.' It was some time, however, before she could unfasten
the door, the same difficulty occurring in the management of this
inner lock as of the outer ; but at length it did open ; and not vain,
as hitherto, was her search ; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of
paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently
JANE AUSTEN. 113
for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable.
Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale.
She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for
half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters ; and while she
acknowledged with awful sensations this striking exemplification of
what Henry had foretold, resolved instantly to peruse every line
before she attempted to rest.
" The dimness of the light her candle emitted made her turn to
it with alarm j but there was no danger of its sudden extinction, it
had yet some hours to burn ; and that she might not have any
greater difficulty in distinguishing the writing than what its ancient
date might occasion, she hastily snuffed it. Alas ! it was snuffed
and extinguished in one. A lamp could not have expired with
more awful effect. Catherine, for a few moments, was motionless
with horror. It was done completely ; not a remnant of light in
the wick could give hope to the rekindling breath. Darkness im-
penetrable and immovable filled the room. A violent gust of
wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment.
Catherine trembled from head to foot. In the pause which suc-
ceeded, a sound like receding footsteps and the closing of a distant
door struck on her affrighted ear. Human nature could support no
more. A cold sweat stood on her forehead, the manuscript fell
from her hand, and, groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily
in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath
the clothes. To close her eyes in sleep that night she felt must be
entirely out of the question. With a curiosity so justly awakened,
and feelings in every way so agitated, repose must be absolutely
impossible. The storm, too, abroad so dreadful 1 She had not
been used to feel alarm from wind, but now every blast seemed
fraught with awful intelligence. The manuscript so wonderfully
found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning's prediction, how
was it to be accounted for ? \Vliat could it contain ? to whom could
it relate ? by what means could it have been so long concealed ?
and how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover
it ! Till she had made herself mistress of its contents, however,
she could have neither repose nor comfort ; and with the sun's first
rays she was determined to peruse it. But many were the tedious
hours which must yet intervene. She shuddered, tossed about in
8
114 LIFE OF
her bed, and envied every quiet sleeper. The storm still raged,
and various were the noises, more terrific even than the wind, which
struck at intervals on her startled ear. The very curtains of her
bed seemed at one moment in motion, and at another the lock of
her door was agitated, as if by the attempt of somebody to enter.
Hollow murmurs seemed to creep along the gallery, and more than
once her blood was chilled by the sound of distant moans. Hour
after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three
proclaimed by all the clocks in the house, before the tempest sub-
sided, or she unknowingly fell fast asleep."
As soon as she wakes in the morning she glances with
greedy eye over the mysterious manuscript, and finds
that it is an inventory of hnen.
Once more her romantic fancy betrays her. General
Tilney is a widower, and Catherine divines, rightly
enough it seems, that his wife was not hnppy, though
we know from a remark of Mrs. Allen's that he got a
good lump of money with her. This raises recollections
of Montoni and his treatment of his ill-starred wife. Is
he not like Montoni, moody and austere, and does he
not show that he has something on his conscience by
sitting up late at night and taking solitary walks ? If
any faith is to be placed in romances, Mrs; Tilney may
be still living and a prisoner, while a wax image has
been buried in her place. There is a set of rooms into
which the General, in showing Catherine over the house,
has not taken her. She imagines that it must hide his
guilty secret. She attempts clandestinely to explore it,
is caught in the act by Henry Tilney, lets out her secret
with her usual simplicity under his cross-examination,
and is covered with confusion.
The General's attentions all this time are constant and
JANE A USTEN. 115
laborious. In person he shows Catherine over the place
and the improvements, makes her uncomfortable by
scolding his children for not treating her with sufficient
courtesy, and pays her a profusion of icy compliments.
Finally he takes her in the carriage and four to spend a
day with Henry Tilney at his parsonage, twenty miles
from Northanger, shows her over its house and grounds,
and, with the most deferential air, asks her opinion about
the furnishing and papering of it in a manner which
shows that he looks upon it as her future home. She
admires a cottage which comes into the view and which
it had been intended to pull down. " You like it," says
the General, "you approve it as an object. It is enough.
Henry, remember that Robinson is spoken to about it.
The cottage remains." Manifestly General Tilney is re-
solved that Catherine Morland shall be his son Henry's
wife, though the great man's motive for desiring so
humble an alliance is a mystery. The mystery is cleared
up and a catastrophe is brought on by the progress of
events elsewhere.
The General is called away from home on business.
He leaves Catherine in the care of his son and daughter,
with whom she greatly enjoys herself in his absence.
One night suddenly, like a thunderclap, he returns. A
hesitating step is presently heard at the door of Catherine's
room. It is that of Miss Tilney, who has come in tears
to say that her father has returned in a state of high dis-
pleasure, that the family are to leave home in two days,
and that Catherine is to be sent away the very next
morning. The carriage has been peremptorily ordered
for her at seven o'clock, and she is not even to have the
116 LIFE OF
escort of a servant, so necessary to a young lady travel-
ling in the posting days. What can be the reason of her
father's wrath and of his cruel conduct to her friend, Miss
Tilney cannot divine. Catherine thinks of the suspicion
she had conceived about INIontoni's treatment of his
wife ; but it is impossible that Henry Tilney can have
betrayed her. The truth is that the General has been in
a fool's paradise, into which he has been led by the lying
tongue of Jack Thorpe. Believing that his sister Isabella
was going to marry James Morland, and having himself
thoughts of Catherine, Jack Thorpe had bragged to the
General, whom he met at Bath, of the wealth and con-
sequence of the Morland family, "throwing in a rich
aunt," and representing Catherine as the destined heiress
of Mr. Allen's estate. Swallowing all this with the eager
credulity of greed, the General had resolved to secure
Catherine for his younger son, and had taken her to
Northanger with that view. But now Jack Thorpe has
lost all hope of Catherine, and at the same time his
sister, the highly sentimental and romantically disin-
terested Isabella^ finding that James Morland would
only have four hundred a year, has thrown him over,
and is trying, though in vain, to catch Captain Tilney,
Henry's elder brother, in his place. All prospect of
connection with the Morland family being at an end,
Jack changes his note, and, meeting General Tilney
again, gives him an account of the Morlands quite op-
posite to that which he had given in the first instance,
understating their wealth and consequence as much as he
had overstated them before. He winds up by saying
that he knew the heir of the Allen property. This it is
JANE A USTEN. 117
that sends the General home in a transport of disap-
pointment and rage, and makes him behave to poor
Catherine as badly as any tyrant of romance. Catherine
wends her sad and solitary way to her home, and there
pensively settles down, often going over to Mrs. Allen
for the pleasure of hearing her speak of Henry Tilney,
but never expecting to see him again.
Of course she does see him again. What was at first
on Henry's part merely interest in a simple and amusing
character, has been ripened by intercourse into love, to
which he is true notwithstanding the paternal ban. One
day he presents himself at Catherine's home, offers his
hand, and is accepted, though her father's decision is
suspended till that of General Tilney shall have been
obtained. Just at this time Miss Tilney marries a
Viscount, and the General is put in good humour by
having a daughter whom he can address as " My Lady."
The prayers of a Viscount and Viscountess prevail.
Catherine's circumstances and expectations are found,
though not so good as Jack Thorpe at first said they
were, better than he afterwards painted them. The
General issues his edict that Henry may make a fool of
himself if he pleases, and the marriage bells are ringing
as the curtain falls.
CHAPTER V.
SOME will think that of all Miss Austen's works
" Emma " is the best. Its heroine is certainly not
the least charming.
" ' Such an eye !— the true hazel eye— and so brilliant! regular
features, open countenance, with a complexion — oh, what a bloom
of full health, and such a pretty height and size ! such a firm and
upright figure ! There is health not merely in her bloom, but in her
air, her head, her glance. One hears something of a child being
" the picture of health " ; now, Emma always gives me the idea of
being the complete jncture of grown-up health. She is loveliness
itself. Mr. Knightley, is not she ? '"
Emma is the daughter of Mr. Woodhouse, known
even to some who have never read Miss Austen as the
typical valetudinarian who " likes his gruel thin, but not
too thin." They live at Hartfield, close to the large
village or little town of Highbury, in Hertfordshire.
Hartfield is close to Highbury, but not in it : it stands in
grounds of its own, and though it has but little of the land
which in those days was the great and almost sole basis
of rural rank, — its acres being a mere notch in the estate
of Mr. Knightley, of Donwell Abbey,— its denizens dis-
tinctly belong to the gentry, having other property, being
LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN. 119
a younger branch of a good family, and one for several
generations not stained by labour. Emma's only sister,
Isabella, being married to Mr. John Knightley, a lawyer
in London and brother of Mr. Knightley, of Donwell
Abbey, she lives alone with her father, is mistress of
Hartfield, and the great lady and the great match of
Highbury. The party at Hartfield had been three, the
third being the excellent Miss Taylor, who had been
Emma's governess, and when Emma had outgrown the
schoolroom remained as a friend. But "poor Miss
Taylor," as Mr. Woodhouse always mournfully calls her,
has married the good-humoured Mr. Weston. They Hve
at Randalls, close to Hartfield. Mrs. Weston, into
whose mouth the description of Emma just quoted is
put, still feels a maternal interest in her former pupil,
with whom she is in constant intercourse.
Emma has her faults. She lost her mother early.
She has had things too much her own way. Slie has
been made to think too much of herself. Her satirical
propensities have not been checked. She has had no
match for her cleverness. Highbury has afforded her no
equal as a friend. Her father has doted on her and seen
nothing in her but perfection. Her governess has been
too fond of her to play a governess's part. One clear-
sighted critic and faithful monitor she has had in the
person of her brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, of Donwell
Abbey, to whom the rapturous description of her beauty
just quoted is addressed by Mrs. Weston. He is Emma's
senior by sixteen years, and when she playfully challenges
his right of censorship, tells her that he has the advan-
tage of her not only in those sixteen years, but in not
120 LIFE OF
being a pretty woman. He is a model of honour and
good sense, as well as a perfect gentleman in appearance
and manner. He has also a vein of sarcastic humour.
Emma regards him with the utmost affection and respect-
He feels a loving interest in Emma, sees her weak points,
and wonders what will become of her. What will become
of her she has herself hardly begun to think. She is
mistress of Hartfield, and devoted to her father, who
dotes on her in return.
Emma fancies that she has resolved not to marry.
She cannot leave her father. But she busies herself in
making matches for others, a propensity against which
Knightley has warned her. This, with her vanity, of
which indeed it is a part, gets her into a scrape which is
the most amusing part of the tale. At the ladies' school
in Highbury kept by Mrs. Goddard, there is a parlour-
boarder named Harriet Smith, of whom nothing is
known except that she is the illegitimate daughter of
somebody who has consigned her to Mrs. Goddard's care.
She is a pretty, simpleminded, commonplace girl, with
soft look, blue eyes, and humble-minded till her ambition
is artificially excited. For want of a more equal and
suitable friendship, Emma Woodhouse takes up Harriet
Smith and undertakes to improve her tastes, form her
manners, and find her a good match. Mr. Knightley's saga-
city frowns on the connection from the beginning, though
Mrs. Weston's indulgence approves it. Mr. Knightley
rightly judges that Harriet is the worst kind of com-
panion that Emma could have, because, knowing nothing
herself, she thinks that Emma knows everything. " Her
ignorance and inferiority are hourly flattery, and of all
JANE AUSTEN. 121
flatteries the worst because undesigned." Harriet already
has a lover in the person of Robert Martin, a worthy
young gentleman farmer and the tenant of Mr. Knight-
ley's home farm, with whose family she has been staying,
and she is evidently disposed to return his love. But a
match with a yeoman is beneath a girl honoured by the
friendship of Miss Emma Woodhouse. Emma sets her-
self to wean Harriet from the attachment and to teach
her to look higher. The object to which she turns her
eyes is Mr. Elton, the new vicar of Highbury, a most
beautiful young man and the social idol of the village.
His company is so sought after that he has more invita-
tions than there are days in the week, and so excellent is
his performance in the church that Miss Nash, the
teacher, has put down all the texts that he has preached
from. The first time Harriet saw him, " the two Abbotts
and she ran into the front room and peeped through the
blind when they heard he was going by, and Miss Nash
came and scolded them away and stayed to look through
herself." Only, the critical Mr. Knightley remarks, that
while Elton can be rational with men, to women he is so
laboriously agreeable that " every feature works " in the
effort to please. This clerical Adonis is perfectly con-
scious of his own merit and value in the marriage mart,
as Emma and her Harriet will find to their cost. Emma
does everything she can to bring Harriet and Mr. Elton
together. To herself she appears successful, though the
reader has his suspicions. She paints Harriet's portrait.
Mr. Elton is in ecstasies, and himself carries it to London
to be framed, giving up the whist club for the purpose.
Harriet is collecting riddles, Mr. Elton writes an
122 LIFE OF
amatory conundrum which appears to be pointed at
Harriet, though it contains a suspicious compliment to
" ready wit." In the meantime, Robert Martin proposes
in a letter which, as Emma is obliged to admit, expresses
good sense, warm attachment, Uberality, propriety, and
dehcacy of feeling. Harriet, if left to herself, evidently
would accept, but under Emma's influence she refuses,
Emma virtually dictating her reply. This is not a very
agreeable part of the story. Whether the writer intended
it or not, Emma in breaking off the connection between
Robert Martin and Harriet shows not only want of
judgment but want of feeling. Her notions of social
grade, and her dislike of the yeomanry as a class which
she can neither associate with nor patronize, also shock
us, though they might have been less offensive in those
more aristocratic days. We are glad to know from the
kindliness with which the yeoman is painted that the
sentiment is that of Miss Emma Woodhouse, not that of
Miss Jane Austen. Mr. Knightley, who has a high
opinion of Martin and had been his adviser on the
occasion, is highly displeased at Emma's conduct, and
his displeasure is most just.
Its justice soon appears. The catastrophe is at hand.
It is not to Harriet that Mr. Elton's addresses have
been really paid, but to Emma herself. He has dared to
aspire to the hand of the great lady and the great match
of Highbury. The transports into which he threw him-
self over the portrait were in fact directed not to its
subject but to the artist. Emma was really the lady of the
riddle. Finding himself by a propitious accident shut
up in a carriage with Emma on their return from a
JANE AUSTEN. 123
dinner-party at Mr. Weston's, he astounds and horrifies
her by pouring forth his love. It marks the manners of
the time that at first she fancies he is drunk. When she
intimates that it was to her friend that his intentions were
supposed to be addressed, he speaks of the friend with
rude disdain. His audacious suit is of course rejected.
Shortly afterwards he makes good his estimate of himself
as a match by going to Bath and there securing the hand
of the dashing and accomplished Miss Augusta Hawkins,
who has a reputed fortune of ten thousand pounds, and
whose married sister, Mrs. Suckling, lives at Maple
Grove and keeps a barouche-landau. He brings his
bride to Highbury amidst universal excitement and
almost universal applause.
Emma now rues her match-making. She has to
undergo the bitter penance of undeceiving Harriet about
Mr. Elton, while she has great difficulty in stifling the
voice of her conscience, which reproaches her with her
error in having broken off Harriet's connection with
Robert Martin. Harriet being lowly-minded and having
only dared to lift her eyes to Mr. Elton because Emma
encouraged her, takes the wreck of her hope well, but
she does not get Mr. Elton entirely out of her heart till
he is married and another fancy has taken possession of
her mind. Then we have the following scene :
" A very few days had passed after this adventure, when Harriet
came one morning to Emma with a small parcel in her hand, and
after sitting down and hesitating, thus began : —
" ' Miss Woodhouse — if you are at leisure, I have something that
I should like to tell you ; a sort of confession to make — and then,
you know, it will be over.'
124 LIFE OF
"Emma was a good deal surprised; but begged her to speak.
There was a seriousness in Harriet's manner which prepared her,
quite as much as her words, for something more than ordinary.
" ' It is my duty, and I am sure it is my wish,' she continued,
' to have no reserves with you on this subject. As I am, happily,
quite an altered creature, in one respect, it is very fit that you should
have the satisfaction of knowing it. I do not want to say more
than is necessary ; I am too much ashamed of having given way
as I have done, and I dare say you understand me.'
" ' Yes,' said Emma, ' I hope I do.'
'' ' How I could so long a time be fancying myself — ' cried Harriet,
warmly. ' It seems like madness ! I can see nothing at all extra-
ordinary in him now. I do not care whether I meet him or not,
except that, of the two, I had rather not see him ; and, indeed, I would
go any distance round to avoid him ; but I do not envy his wife in
the least : I neither admire her nor envy her, as I have done. She
is very charming, I dare say, and all that ; but I think her very ill-
tempered and disagreeable : I shall never forget her look ihe other
night. However, I assure you, Miss Woodhouse, I wish her no
evil. No ; let them be ever so happy together, it will not give me
another moment's pang ; and, to convince you that I have been
speaking truth, I am going to destroy — what I ought to have
destroyed longed ago — what I ought never to have kept : I know
that very well (blushing as she spoke). However, now I will destroy
it all ; and it is my particular wish to do it in your presence, that
you may see how rational I am grown. Cannot you guess what this
parcel holds?' said she, with a conscious look.
" ' Not the least in the world. Did he ever give you anything ? '
" ' No — I cannot call them gifts ; but they are things that I have
valued very much. '
" She held the parcel towards her, and Emma read the words
'Most precious treasures,' on the lop. Ilcr curiosity was greatly
excited. Harriet unfolded the parcel, and she looked on with
impatience. Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty little
Tunbridge-warc box, which Harriet opened : it was well lined witli
the softest cotton ; but, excepting tiie cotton, Emma saw only a
small piece of court-plaister.
" ' Now,' said Harriet, 'you must recollect.'
JANE AUSTEN. 125
'< ' No, indeed I do not.'
♦* ' Dear me ! I should not have thought it possible you could for-
get what passed in this very room about court-plaister, one of the
very last times we ever met in it. It was but a very few days before
I had my sore throat— just before Mr. and Mrs. John Knightley
came ; I think the very evening. Do you not remember his cutting
his finger with your new penknife, and your recommending court-
plaister ? But, as you had none about you, and knew I had, you
desired me to supply him ; and so I took mine out, and cut him a
piece : but it was a great deal too large, and he cut it smaller, and
kept playing some time with what was left before he gave It back to
me. And so then, in my nonsense, I could not help making a
treasure of it : so I put it by, never to be used, and looked at it now
and then as a great treat.'
" ' My dearest Harriet ! ' cried Emma, putting her hand before her
face and jumping up, 'you make me more ashamed of myself than
I can bear. Remember it ? Ay, I remember it all now ; all, except
your saving this relic : I knew nothing of that till this moment,—
but the cutting the finger, and my recommending court-plaister, and
saying I had none about me. — Oh ! my sins, my sins ! — And I had
plenty all the while in my pocket ! One of my senseless tricks. I
deserve to be under a continual blush all the rest of my life. Well
(sitting down again), go on : what else? '
" ' And had you really some at hand yourself? I am sure I never
suspected it, you did it so naturally.'
" ' And so you actually put this piece of court-plaister by for his
sake?' said Emma, recovering from her slate of shame and feeling,
divided between wonder and amusement ; and secretly she added to
herself, ' Lord bless me ! when should I ever have thought of putting
by in cotton a piece of court-plaister that Frank Churchill had been
pulling about ! I never was'equal to this. '
"'Here,' resumed Harriet, turning to her box again, 'here is
something still more valuable, — I mean that has been more valuable,
— because this is what did really once belong to him, which the
court-plaister never did.'
" Emma was quite eager to see this superior treasure. It was the
end of an old pencil, the part without any lead.
"'This was really his,' said Harriet. 'Do not you remember
126 LIFE OF
one morning ? — no, I dare say you do not. But one morning — I
forget exactly the day — but perhaps it was the Tuesday or Wednesday
before that evening, he wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-
book ; it was about spruce-beer. Mr. Knightley had been telling
him something about brewing spruce-beer, and he wanted to put it
down ; but when he took out his pencil, there was so little lead that
he soon cut it all away, and it would not do, so you lent him another,
and this was left upon the table as good for nothing. But I kept
my eye on it ; and, as soon as I dared, caught it up, and never parted
with it again from that moment.'
"'I do remember it,' cried Emma; 'I perfectly remember it.
Talking about spruce-beer. Oh ! yes. Mr. Knightley and I both
saying we liked it, and Mr. Elton's seeming resolved to learn to
like it too. I perfectly remember it. Stop — Mr. Knightley was
standing just here, was not he ? I have an idea he was standing
just here.'
"'Ah ! I do not know. I cannot recollect. It is very odd, but
I cannot recollect. Mr. Elton was sitting here, I remember, much
about where I am now.'
'"Well, goon.'
"'Oh! that's all. I have nothing more to show you, or to say,
except that I am now going to throw them both behind the fire, and
I wish you to see me do it.'
" ' My poor dear Harriet ! and have you actually found happiness
in treasuring up these things ? '
"'Yes, simpleton as I was ! — but I am quite ashamed of it now,
and wish I could forget as easily as I can burn them. It was very
wrong of me, you know, to keep any remembrances after he was
married. I knew it was — but had not resolution enough to part
with them.'
" ' But, Harriet, is it necessary to burn the court-plaister ? I have
not a word to say for the bit of old pencil, but the court-plaister
might be useful.'
" 'I shall be happier to burn it,' cried Harriet. ' It has a dis-
agreeable look to me. I must get rid of everything. There it goes,
and there is an end, thank Heaven ! of Mr. Elton.'
> ))
The Mr. Frank Churchill here mentioned is the young
JANE AUSTEN. 127
man whom destiny seems to have provided for Emma
herself. He is the son of Mr. Weston by a former
marriage, and has been adopted by wealthy relatives in
Yorkshire whose name he has taken, and whose fortune
he is to inherit. He has been always coming to High-
bury, but has never come, being prevented, as he says, by
the tyrannical caprice of Mrs. Churchill, who will not
let him leave her side. Mr. and Mrs. Weston have
however, filled Highbury with the report of his perfec-
tions, and they have been cherishing the hope of a
match between him and Emma. At last he comes,
and he proves to be in person, manners and conversa-
tion everything that Highbury believed him to be, and
becomes generally popular. Mr. Knightley alone, who
had conceived a prejudice against the young man before
his arrival, remains rather unaccountably set against him.
To Emma, who had felt a natural interest in him before-
hand, he pays the most marked attention. Emma
receives the attentions with pleasure, and Mr. and Mrs.
Weston think that their hope is going to be fulfilled.
But Emma, though at one time on the brink of love, does
not go beyond the brink.
Mr. Frank Churchill's arrival, however, had been
immediately followed by that of Miss Jane Fairfax,
who came to stay with her grandmother and aunt, Mrs.
and Miss Bates, at Highbury. Miss Fairfax is very beauti-
ful and highly accomplished, but she is a child of mis-
fortune. She has been brought up by charitable friends,
and is now, as it is given out, going to earn bitter bread
as a governess. She is demure and very reserved.
There is something mysterious about her. Apparently
128 LIFE OF
she has something on her mind besides the necessity of
going out as a governess. Emma dishkes her, partly
because she is tired of hearing the Bateses sing her
praises, partly on account of her reserve, partly, as the
censorious Mr. Knightley suggests, on account of her
superior accomplishments. Jane has met Frank Churchill
at Weymouth, but cannot be induced to talk about him.
For his part he affects to regard Jane as a mere acquaint-
ance, and in talking about her to Emma criticises her
character, her complexion, and her way of dressing her
hair, as though she were entirely indifferent to him. He
even seems to share an injurious fancy which Emma
had conceived about a previous part of Jane's history.
At the same time he goes a good deal, on various pre-
tences, to the house of the Bateses, which, as Mrs. Bates
is deaf and her daughter is an insufferably garrulous
old maid, he would not be likely to do without some
other attraction. To the keen eye of Mr. Knightley,
an interchange of looks and other signs of intelligence
between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax begin to be
visible. Jane plays divinely on the piano, but has
no instrument. Frank Churchill goes all the way to
London to have his hair cut. Immediately afterwards
Jane Fairfax receives from an unknown donor the gift
of a Broadwood piano. Still Frank Churchill continues
to flirt with Emma, and the hope of Mr. and Mrs.
Weston is confirmed.
Other complications arise. Mr. Knightley, by the
high opinion which, partly in opposition to Emma's
prejudice, he expresses of Jane Fairfax, by his dchght
at her playing on the piano, and by the attention which
JANE AUSTEN. 129
he shows her and her aunt in sending his carriage to
take them to a party, gives birth to a behef, especially
in the mind of Mr. Weston, that he is falling in love
with Jane. He is suspected of being the giver of the
mysterious piano. He, however, contradicts and laughs
at the report in a manner which satisfies Emma, who
knows the perfect openness of his character. But this,
as will presently appear, is not the only false impression
to which his kindness and courtesy give rise.
Harriet, while she is taking a walk with another girl,
is mobbed by a gang of gipsies. She is rescued by
Frank Churchill. An interesting situation is thus
created, and Emma, whose fancy is incorrigibly match-
making, and who had already been led to form surmises
in that direction, thinks that it must lead to love. In
a conversation with Harriet on the subject, her con-
jecture is apparently confirmed, and she goes away with
the belief that Harriet at all events is in love with
Frank. Mindful of her former misadventure, she tries
to give her friend sage counsel, advises her to check
his feelings, bids her be observant of the object of
her aspirations, and let his behaviour be the guide of
her sensations. At the same time she owns that more
wonderful things have happened and matches of greater
disparity have taken place. Harriet has not mentioned
the name, and Emma in her extreme caution desires
that no name may ever pass their lips. She and
Harriet are at cross- purposes, as soon appears.
The plots runs on, with great variety of social acci-
dents and lively play of character, through a series of
scenes, including two dinner-parties, a ball, a garden-
9
130 LIFE OF
party and a picnic; the subordinate personages, Mr.
Woodhouse, Mr. and Mrs. John Knightley, Mr. and
Mrs. Elton, Mrs. and Miss Bates, performing their
several parts. The mystery of the situation is all the
time artfully preserved.
The mystery is cleared up and the play is brought to
its conclusion by the death of the great Mrs. Churchill.
Frank Churchill, being now set free, avows a secret
engagement to Jane Fairfax. It was in reality to meet
her that he had come to Highbury. His attentions to
Emma had been either a mere mask for his connection
Mith Jane, or an indulgence of his vanity and his love
of amusement. They had, however, excited the jealousy
of his betrothed enough to bring on a quarrel between
them which made her look in earnest for a situation
as a governess, and to produce very strained relations
between Jane and Emma, so that Jane had avoided
Emma's visits and refused to take an airing in the
Hartfield carriage or to eat arrowroot from the Hart-
field storeroom. The Westons having remained under
their fond delusion, Emma is taken to Randalls by
Mr. Weston, that his wife may there break to her what
they both suppose will be dreadful news. They find to
their relief that she is heart-whole.
Emma may rejoice in her own escape, but she has
a second time to do penance for her match-making pro-
pensities by breaking the sad news of Frank Churchill's
engagement to her unlucky Harriet. This she proceeds
to do ; but she finds to her surprise that the tidings
have reached Harriet already and affect her not at all.
The man of whom Harriet had been speaking in her
JANE A USTEN. 131
last conversation with Emma was not Frank Churchill^
for whom she cares nothing, but one infinitely his
superior. It was Mr. Knightley, and by Mr. Knightley,
she thinks she has reason to hope, her affection is re-
turned. Emma is thunderstruck. Harriet sees it, and
acknowledges that Mr. Knightley is far above her, but
reminds Emma of her own encouraging words about
the possible occurrence of marriages of disparity, and
hopes that Emma is too good to oppose the match.
Instantly the state of Emma's own heart is revealed to
her. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be
in love with Mr. Knightley than with Frank Churchill ?
Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's
having reason to hope that her affection was returned ?
" It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that
Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself."
Harriet, however, is ready with her proofs. Emma
had told her to observe the gentleman's demeanour, and
she has observed it. At the ball, when Mr. Elton had
rudely refused to dance with Harriet and she was left
forlorn, Mr. Knightley had come to the rescue and been
her partner. At the garden-party at his house he had
walked with her apart from the rest of the company. It
is true, too, that he has been speaking with pleasure of
the improvement which he found in Harriet, and he
seemed to like her society. Emma is plunged in misery,
and her suffering is all the greater because she owes it
partly to her own folly in having excited and encouraged
Harriet's ambition, though she had little dreamed that
her own Mr. Knightley was its mark.
It is needless to say that Harriet is totally mistaken.
132 LIFE OF
Mr. Knightley has never thought of her. He danced
with her at the ball out of compassion and courtesy.
When he took her for a walk with him at Donwell it was
to show her an attractive view of Robert Martin's farm.
If he has sought to improve his acquaintance with her it
has been in the hope of bringing her and Martin together
again. His real attraction has been to Emma, as Emma's
has been to him. Friendship on both sides has been
gradually warmed and ripened into love. Of this, looking
back, we sec that there have been intimations all along.
At the ball Emma cannot bear that Mr. Knightley
should, instead of standing up to dance, be classing
himself with the fathers and husbands and whist-players,
so young as he looked. " His tall, upright, firm figure
among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the
elderly men was such as Emma felt must draw every-
body's eyes." Later in the evening, when he has been
dancing with Harriet Smith, and Mr. Weston is heard
calling on them to begin dancing again —
" 'I am ready,' said Emma, 'whenever I am wanted.'
" ' Whom are you going to dance with ? ' asked Mr.
Knightley.
" She hesitated a moment and then replied, ' With
you, if you will ask me.'
" ' Will you ? ' said he, offering his hand.
" ' Indeed I will. You have shown that you can
dance, and you know that we are really not so much
brother and sister as to make it at all improper.'
" ' Brother and sister ! no, indeed.' "
The prejudice which Knightley, usually so just,
allowed himself to form against Frank Churchill before
JANE AUSTEN. 183
he had seen him, was in fact unconscious jealousy twin-
born with unconscious love. Emma's disturbance when
it was supposed that Knightley was falling in love with
Jane Fairfax, and her anxiety to prove that the belief
was false, were corresponding indications on her side.
Believing that Emma had given her hand to Frank
Churchill, Knightley had left home and gone to stay
with his brother and sister-in-law in London, where,
however, the picture of wedded happiness only added a
sting to his sorrow. Returning to Highbury when Frank
Churchill's engagement to Jane Fairfax has been de-
clared, he calls at Hartfield in his character of friend
and counsellor to comfort Emma. To his surprise and
delight, he finds that, so far as Frank Churchill is con-
cerned, she needs no comfort. To her surprise and
delight, as they are walking together in the shrubbery
he tells his love, and misery gives place to perfect
happiness. They go in, an engaged couple, to tea with
Mr. Woodhouse, who, little suspecting that the man is
going to rob him of his Emma, expresses his anxious
hope that he may not have caught cold from the damp-
ness of the evening. " Could he have seen into the
heart, he would have cared very little for the lungs."
It is a really charming scene.
Knightley and Emma are in bliss. But poor Harriet
Smith is cast out of it a second time. Amidst the glow
of happiness brought on by Knightley's declaration,
Emma had time to rejoice that Harriet's secret had not
escaped her, and to resolve that it never should. But
we are called upon specially to remark that she had not
any of that "heroism of sentiment," tliat "generosity
134 LIFE OF
run mad," which could lead her for a moment to think
of trying to transfer Knightley's affections to her friend,
or of refusing him because he could not marry them
both, as the heroines of romantic fiction might have
done. But Harriet, as might have been foreseen, is
united to her Robert Martin.
Nor is Mr. Woodhouse forgotten. His consternation
of course is extreme. Emma, the best of daughters,
cannot think of leaving her father. But Mr. Knightley
promises to leave Donwell and live at Hartfield. A
robbery which providentially takes place in the neigh-
bourhood makes the nervous old gentleman feel the need
of a stout protector, and he allows the marriage to take
place without delay.
Lord Brabourne cannot endure Knightley, thinks that
he interferes too much, judges other people too quickly
and too harshly, that he is too old for Emma, and that
there is something incongruous in her marrying the elder
brother of her elder sister's husband. He thinks that
Knightley does not rise above the standard of respect-
ability, that he is too respectable to be a hero at all. He
is certain " that Emma was not nearly so happy as she
pretended, that her husband frequently lectured her, was
jealous of every agreeable man that ventured to say a
civil word to her, and evinced his intellectual superiority
by such a plethora of eminently sensible conversations
as either speedily hurried her to an untimely grave or
induced her to run away with somebody possessed of an
inferior intellect but more endearing qualities." The
woman judged otherwise, and we feel pretty sure that
her judgment was right. The vine had found its sup-
JANE A USTEN. 185
porting elm, and we do not believe that the elm ever
lectured its encircling vine, much less that it lectured in
such a style as to cause untimely death or elopement.
We have some misgivings, however, as to the final per-
sistence of Mrs. Knightley never to tell Mr. Knightley
Harriet Smith's secret, especially as Mr. Martin's farm
was in sight from the lime-walk of Donwell Abbey.
"Emma" is very rich in character, especially in the
comic varieties, and in the social incident by which cha-
racter is brought out. Highbury, just as Highbury was
in those quiet days, lives and acts before us.
Mr. Woodhouse's valetudinarianism is perhaps a little
overdone, as when he proposes to a whole party to join
him in a little water gruel, and his nervous tremors
about the weather, open doors and dangerous corners in
driving, would be extreme in the picture of an old lady,
and are scarcely credible in a picture of an old gentle-
man. Still he is excellent fun. His benevolence leads
him to watch not only over his own digestion, but over
the digestion of his friends ; and his daughter has to take
care that he does not out of sheer kindness starve his
guests, and that when she has provided a good dinner or
supper her friends are permitted to eat it. He tenderly
reproaches her with having allowed the muffin to be
handed round more than once. His horror of marriage,
which disturbs the even tenor of his life, is interrupted
by his fear of wedding-cake, which he vainly tries to pre-
vent everybody from eating, having armed himself with
the formal opinion of his medical oracle, Mr. Parry, that
wedding-cake, unless eaten in moderation, may disagree
with most people. When Emma goes out to a party.
136 LIFE OF
leaving Mrs. Goddard and Mrs. Bates to spend the
evening with her father, and having provided a good
supper for the two old ladies, who do not get good
suppers at home, we at once foresee what will happen.
It does happen : the sweetbread and asparagus, of which
Mrs. Bates happened to be particularly fond, are pro-
nounced not cooked enough and are sent away, while the
two old ladies are regaled on baked apples and biscuits.
Yet nobody, not even his strong-minded and somewhat
sarcastic son-in-law, John Knightley, has a word of any-
thing but respect and regard for Mr. Woodhouse. He
owes this in part to his social position, mainly to his
genuine kindness and courtesy, while Emma's devotion
is in itself enough to keep ridicule at bay. His other
daughter, Isabella, wrapped up in her husband and
children, and, if not a valetudinarian, fully entering into
Mr. Woodhouse's valetudinarianism, is more her father's
child, while Emma is apparently more the child of the
lost mother. The same skill is shown in making the
distinction between the characters of the two brothers
Knightley, the two being cast in the same mould and
equal in general worth, but that of the elder being
superior in depth, tenderness, and refinement to that of
the younger, who perhaps, as a lawyer, has something of
professional hardness.
The Eltons arc also excellent — Mr. Elton, the clerical
Adonis and the idol of school-teachers and school-oirls,
thoroughly conscious of his own perfections and filled
with disgust at tlic thought of his being deemed not too
good for Harriet Smith ; Mrs. Elton, accomplished and
dashing, but intensely conceited, pushing and ill-bred.
JANE AUSTEN. 137
always boasting of her relations to the Sucklings, their
Maple Grove and their barouche-landau, coolly seating
herself as soon as she sets foot in Highbury by the side
of Emma on the social throne, surprised to find that the
person who had brought Emma up was " quite a gentle-
woman," talking of "Knightley," making herself the centre
of everything, patronizing everybody, and promising to
find Jane Fairfax a situation as governess in a family
where they have wax candles in the schoolroom.
" Insufferable woman " is the reflection which naturally
bursts from Emma after their first interview. But to the
reader Mrs. Elton is very far from being insufferable.
But no character in the tale is more amusing than
that of Miss Bates, the worthy old maid, happy in eking
out a narrow income and taking care of a failing mother,
universally popular from her effusive goodness of heart,
and at the same time supremely ridiculous from the
confusion which reigns in her brain and is poured forth
by her voluble tongue. Mr. Woodhouse, whom, as a
quiet talker upon little matters and a retailer of harmless
gossip, she exactly suits, has sent her a present of Hart-
field pork, with anxious directions as to the manner in
which it is to be cooked. At the same time arrives the
news that Mr. Elton is going to be married. Miss Bates
rushes in, overflowing at once with excitement about
the news and with gratitude for the present of pork.
" Full of thanks, and full of news, Miss Bates knew not which
to give quickest. Mr. Knightley soon saw that he had lost his
moment, and that not another syllable of communication could rest
with him.
"*0h, my dear sir, how are you this morning? My dear Miss
138 LIFE OF
Woodhouse — I come quite overpowered. Such a beautiful hind-
quarter of pork ! You are too bountiful? Have you heard the
news? Mr. Elton is going to be married.'
" Emma had not had time even to think of Mr. Elton, and she
was so completely surprised that she could not avoid a little start,
and a little blush, at the sound.
" 'There is my news — I thought it would interest you,' said Mr.
Knightley, with a smile, which implied a conviction of some part of
what had passed between them.
"'But where could yoti hear it?' cried Miss Bates. 'Where
could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes
since I received Mrs. Cole's note — no, it cannot be more than five
— or at least ten — for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready
to come out — I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about
the pork — ^Jane was standing in the passage — were you not, Jane? —
for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large
enough. So I said I would go down and see, and Jane said, " Shall
I go down instead ? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has
been washing the kitchen." — "Oh, my dear," — said I — well, and
just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins — that's all I know. A
Miss Hawkins of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly
have heard it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it,
she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins '
" ' I was with Mr. Cole on business an hour and a half ago. Pie
had just read Elton's letter as I was shown in, and handed it to me
directly.'
*' ' Well ! that is quite — I suppose there never was a piece of news
more generally interesting. My dear sir, you are really too bountiful.
My mother desires her very best compliments and regards, and a
thousand thanks, and says you really quite oppress her.'
" 'We consider our Ilartfield pork,' replied Mr. Woodhouse —
' indeed it certainly is, so very superior to all other pork, that
Emma and I cannot have a greater pleasure than '
" 'Oh, my dear sir, as my mother says, our friends are only too
good to us. If ever there were people who, without having great
wealth tlicmselves, had everything they could wisli for, I am sure it
is us. We may well say that "our lot is cast in a goodly heritage."
Well, Mr. Knightley, and so you actually saw the letter — well '
JANE AUSTEN. 1S9
" ' It was short — merely to announce — but cheerful, exulting, of
course.' Here was a sly glance at Emma. ' He had been so for-
tunate as to — I forget the precise words — one has no business to
remember them. The information was, as you state, that he was
going to be married to a Miss Hawkins. By his style I should
imagine it just settled.' "
The hand which drew Miss Bates, though it could not
have drawn Lady Macbeth, could have drawn Dame
Quickly or the nurse in " Romeo and Juliet."
CHAPTER VI.
THERE is a tradition that among a party of distin-
guished literary men who had met in a country
house and were discussing the merits of different authors,
it was proposed that each should write down the name
of the work of fiction which had given him the greatest
pleasure, and that on opening the slips of paper it was
found that seven bore the name of "Mansfield Park."
Of all Jane Austen's works this perhaps is the one which
will best repay careful perusal. It teems with delicate
touches of character and fine strokes of art.
The principal figure in " Mansfield Park " is Fanny
Price. Fanny's mother is the wife of a poor lieutenant
of marines, and has married " to disoblige her family."
But she has a sister who " with only seven thousand
pounds had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas
Bertram of Mansfield Park, in the county of North-
ampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a
baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequence
of a handsome house and large income." She has
another sister married to Mr. Norris, who holds the
family living of Mansfield. Mrs. Price's family multi-
plying, she is glad to make up the quarrel with her
LIFE OF J A NE A US TEN. 141
family, and it is proposed to relieve her of one of her
children. The proposal comes from Mrs. Norris, who
gives herself the credit, but adroitly throws the burden
on Sir Thomas. Not to the Rectory, therefore, Fanny,
the selected child, is brought, but to Mansfield Park.
Mansfield Park is a mansion worthy of the baronetage,
with a park six miles round, a great train of domestics, a
grand butler heading each evening the solemn procession
with the tea urn, a bewigged coachman, and all the
equipments of aristocratic state and luxury. The style
of the writer seems to rise a little with the grandeur of
the scene, and there is an approach to tragic dignity at
the close.
To the inmates of Mansfield Park Fanny Price is
introduced. Sir Thomas is a most worthy man, superior
in understanding, and not only a baronet but a gentleman.
He is, however, stiff, stately, and somewhat awful. There
is no merriment except in his absence. He loves his
children, but does not find his way to their heart. His
wife is a brainless beauty, indolent and apathetic, spend-
ing her life on the sofa in doing fancy work or fondling
her pug, guided in all great matters by her husband and
in all little matters by her sister, the busybody Mrs.
Norris, but perfectly harmless and good-natured. There
are two boys, Thomas and Edmund, two girls, Maria and
Julia. The poor little Fanny is at first miserable in the
strange house and amidst the unwonted grandeur. No-
body means to be unkind to her, but nobody is kind.
She is " disheartened by Lady Bertram's silence, awed
by Sir Thomas's grave looks, and quite overcome by
Mrs. Norris's admonitions. Her elder cousins mortify
142 LIFE OF
her by reflections on her size, and abash her by noticing
her shyness ; Miss Lee (the governess) wonders at her
ignorance, and the maidservants sneer at her clothes."
To complete her woes, she feels that it is naughty in her
not to be happy. At last she finds a friend and champion
in the younger boy Edmund, with whose destiny we see
at once her destiny is linked. He begins by helping her
to write to her dear sailor brother William, and soon he
becomes entire master of her affections.
Time goes on. Tom Bertram grows up " with all the
liberal dispositions of an eldest son who feels born only
for expense and enjoyment." Maria and Julia grow up
handsome, accomplished, well-bred, but without sterling
qualities, showing in their characters the bad effects at
once of their father's reserve and of their Aunt Norris's
fondness and flattery. Edmund is the flower of the
family. He is destined for orders, and in time for the
family living, though the debts of his elder brother have
somewhat compromised his prospects of preferment and
compelled Sir Thomas to sell the next presentation to
the epicurean Dr. Grant, doing thereby, as he feels, an
injustice to his younger son, though it does not seem to
enter his head that he is doing an injustice to the souls
of the parishioners. Mr. Norris being defunct, Mrs.
Norris has moved from the Rectory to the White House;
but she is perpetually at the Park, to the misfortune of
Fanny Price, towards whom she is always harsh and
censorious, constantly reminding her of her situation and
making a slave of her, while she idolizes and spoils the
Misses Bertram. Edmund still treats Fanny with the
same kindness ; he directs her reading, trains her mind,
JANE A USTEN. 143
provides a horse for her, and teaches her to ride, and is
in all things an affectionate brother to her, while his own
excellence unfolds into manhood. On her part gratitude,
admiration, and friendship are fast ripening into love.
The season of love and love-adventures arrives. That
the mice may play for our amusement, the cat is sent
away. Sir Thomas finds it necessary to go and look
after his estate in Antigua. Even the good Fanny
cannot help sinfully feeling that his absence .is a relief
There come to Mansfield Henry and Mary Crawford,
the brother and sister of Mrs. Grant, whose guests at the
Rectory they are. Henry Crawford is a brilliant man
of the world with a good property, and so fascinating
that though not handsome he is thought so. Mary
Crawford is a siren full of grace and wit, besides playing
enchantingly on the harp. But they have been brought
up under the influence of their uncle. Admiral Crawford,
an immoral old gentleman, and they are both of them
light and unprincipled, though their superiority of
intellect has preserved their moral taste.
Edmund Bertram, country-bred though his under-
standing is excellent, falls desperately in love with the
London liveliness and glitter of Mary Crawford. He
cannot help seeing her want of principle and being
shocked by the levity with which she talks of serious
subjects, and which is especially uncongenial to him as he
is going to be a clergyman and thinks worthily of his
caUing. But he blinds himself to facts, dwells on Mary's
amiability and good-nature, which are real, and sets
down her faults to the account of a bad education.
Fanny Price undergoes the pain not only of watching
144 LIFE OF
the growth of this rising passion which is going to rob
her of the idol of her own heart, and the object of
which, to enhance her anguish, she sees to be unworthy,
but of being taken into Edmund's confidence and having
her judgment, which steadily rebels, pressed into the
service of his fond delusion. For Edmund, while he
regards Fanny with the utmost affection as a sister, has
no suspicion that she regards him otherwise than as a
brother. The pages in which the martyrdom of Fanny
Price's love is told are among the highest effort of the
writer's art.
'"I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny,' said
Edmund, affectionately, ' must be beyond the reach of any
sermons. '
" Fanny turned farther into the window ; and Miss Crawford had
only time to say, in a pleasant manner, ' I fancy Miss Price has
been more used to deserve praise than to hear it ; ' when being
earnestly invited by the Miss Bertrams to join in a glee, she tripped
oft" to the instrument, leaving Edmund looking after her in an
ecstasy of admiration of all her many virtues, from her obliging
manners down to her light and graceful tread.
" ' There goes good humour, I am sure,' said he presently.
' There goes a temper which would never give pain ! How well she
walks ! and how readily she falls in with the inclination of others !
joining them the moment she is asked. What a pity,' he added,
after an instant's reflection, ' that she should have been in such
hands 1 '
"Fanny agreed to it, and had the pleasure of seeing him contiiuie
at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee ; and of
having his eyes soon turned, like hers, towards the scene without,
where all that was solemn, and soothing, and lovely, appeared in
the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep
shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. ' Here's harmony ! '
said she ; ' here's repose ! Flere's what may leave all painting and
all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe 1
JANE AUSTEN. 145
Here's what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to
rapture ! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there
could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world ; and there
certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of nature were more
attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by
contemplating such a scene.'
" 'I like to hear your enthusiasm, Fanny. It is a lovely night,
and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in
some degree, as you do ; who have not, at least, been given a taste
for nature in early life. They lose a great deal.'
" ' Yoii taught me to think and feel on the subject, cousin.'
" ' I had a very apt scholar. There's Arcturus looking very
bright.'
" ' Yes, and the Bear. I wish I could see Cassiopeia.'
" * We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid ?'
" ' Not in the least. It is a great while since we have had any
star-gazing.'
" ' Yes ; I do not know how it has happened.' Tlie glee began.
' We will stay till this is finished, Fanny,' said he, turning his back
on the window ; and as it advanced, she had the mortification of
seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees towards
the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers,
among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again.'
"Fanny sighed alone at the window till scolded away by Mrs,
Norris's threats of catching cold."
Meantime Henry Crawford, in his profligate way, is
making love to Maria and Julia Bertram at the same
time, while the sisters, both in love with him, are
rivals for his regard. But Maria is already engaged,
through the manoeuvring of Mrs. Norris, whose darling
she is, to Mr. Rushworth, a neighbouring squire with
twelve thousand a year but no brains. Nevertheless
Henry Crawford finally gives the preference to Maria^
who is the greater beauty of the two, and with her carries
on a scandalous flirtation, while her betrothed " stands
lO
146 LIFE OF
dangling his bonnet and plume," and can only relieve
himself by disparaging Mr, Crawford's stature.
Mary Crawford has moral and intellectual taste enough
to appreciate Edmund Bertram ; she is as much in love
with him as her shallow heart can be, and is apparently
ready to accept him ; but her worldly ambition receives
a shock when she finds that he is going to be a clergy-
man. Before the discovery, she had spoken to him in
very disparaging terms of the profession as one which
no man of spirit would enter, and when the discovery
is made she cannot get over it, and labours with her
siren art to dissuade her lover from a step which would
close the door against all hope of public life and worldly
distinction. Her prejudice is perhaps increased by the
daily sight of Dr, Grant, a respectable clergyman in his
way and a good preacher, but an indolent and selfish
hon vivant, who, if he is disappointed about a green goose,
quarrels with his excellent wife and sulks for a whole
evening. About the small income, to do her justice,
she does not seem to think so much. Edmund, however,
cannot consent to change his profession, and he vainly
struggles to remove her prejudice, for he is desperately
in love.
The love affairs, that between Edmund Bertram and
Mary Crawford and that between Henry Crawford and
Maria Bertram, with the rivalry of Julia, the jealousy of
Mr, Rushworth, and the martyrdom of Fanny, are
carried on through a succession of scenes, Sir Thomas
being still absent in Antigua, where the wishes of all the
party except his wife would long detain him.
The party go to spend a day at Sotherton, Mr.
JANE AUSTEN. 147
Rushworth's place, and both on the road and in the
wanderings about the house, the grounds, and the "wil-
derness," moving incidents occur, the flirtation of Mr.
Crawford with Miss Bertram especially reaching a great
height. This picture of passion and jealousy is finely
set off by the figure of Mrs. Norris bandying formal
compliments with the dull Mrs. Rushworth, snapping at
Fanny, and spunging on the housekeeper for cream
cheeses and pheasants' eggs. The party at length sets
out for home.
'"Well, Fanny, this has been a fine day for you, upon my
word ! ' said Mrs. Norris, as they drove through the park. ' No-
thing but pleasure from beginning to end 1 I am sure you ought to
be veiy much obliged to your Aunt Bertram and me, for contriving
to let you go. A pretty good day's amusement you have had ! '
"Maria was just discontented enough to say directly, ' I think
you have done pretty well yourself, ma'am. Your lap seems full of
good things, and here is a basket of something between us, which
has been knocking my elbow unmercifully.'
" ' My dear, it is only a beautiful little heath, which that nice old
gardener would make me take ; but if it is in your way, I will have
it in my lap directly. There, Fanny, you shall carry that parcel for
me ; take great care of it ; do not let it fall ; it is a cream cheese,
just like the excellent one we had at dinner. Nothing would satisfy
that good old Mrs. Whitaker, but my taking one of the cheeses. I
stood out as long as I could, till the tears almost came into her eyes,
and I knew it was just the sort that my sister would be delighted
with. That Mrs. Whitaker is a.treasure ! She was quite shocked
when I asked her whether wine was allowed at the second table,
and she has turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns.
Take care of the cheese, Fanny. Now I can manage the other
parcel and the basket very well.'
" ' What else have you been spunging?' said Maria, half pleased
that Sotherton should be so complimented.
" ' Spunging, my dear 1 It is nothing but four of those beautiful
148 LIFE OF
pheasants' eggs, which Mrs. Whitaker would quite force upon me ;
she would not take a denial. She said it must be such an amuse-
ment to me, as she understood I lived quite alone, to have a few
living creatures of that sort ; and so to be sure it will. I shall get
the dairymaid to set them under the first spare hen, and if they
come to good I can have them moved to my own house and borrow
a coop ; and it will be a great delight to me in my lonely hours to
attend to them. And if I have good luck, your mother shall have
some.'
" It was a beautiful evening, mild and still, and the drive was as
pleasant as the serenity of nature could make it ; but when Mrs.
Norris ceased speaking, it was altogether a silent drive to those
within. Their spirits were in general exhausted ; and to determine
whether the day had afforded most pleasure or pain, might occupy
the meditations of almost all."
Can anything be more vivid than this picture of the
sinking of Mrs. Norris's chatter into the general silence,
while they all roll on through the still evening, the heart
of each exhausted with the joy or sorrow of the day?
The next thing is that the party at Mansfield Park get
up private theatricals. The idea is put into their heads
by the objectionable Mr. Yates, a nobleman's younger
son who has joined the party, having come from a great
house where they had been getting up a play but had
been prevented from performing it by the untoward
death of a grandmother. Edmund, the conscience of
the party, protests against a scheme which he knows and
which they all more or less know that his father would
disapprove, and which in the absence of the head of the
house is unseemly. But his protest is unavailing. To
complete his dismay the play chosen, after the usual
conflict of tastes and vanities, is Lovers' Vows, and parts
are cast for Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram so
J A NE A USTEN. 149
that Crawford will have to play Miss Bertram's lover.
Edmund protests with increased vehemence. But his
virtue is doomed to a fall. Miss Crawford takes the
part of Amelia, and Anhalt is to make love to her. But
there is no one in the family party to take the part of
Anhalt. She is distressed at the thought of its being
taken by a stranger ; her lover shares her embarrassment,
the siren uses her allurements, and to prevent worse
mischief Edmund persuades himself that there is nothing
for it but that he should take the part of Anhalt himself.
He labours hard to sophisticate his own judgment and
tries to make Fanny, for whose moral instincts he has a
deep respect, his accomplice in the attempt. All the
spirits of evil triumph in the victory over Edmund's
virtue. Fanny is horrified at this self-abasement of her
idol. For herself, morally firm and steadfast, though
sensitive, timorous, and lowly in her own eyes, she with
gentle resolution refuses to take a part, and only with
much misgiving consents to fill a vacant place by reading
in the rehearsal. Henry Crawford having distinctly
thrown the handkerchief to Maria by giving her the
first female part and the one in which she would have
him to play her lover, Julia is in dudgeon. Otherwise
all goes on swimmingly. Mrs. Norris and the maids are
at work on the green baize curtain, in the making of
which, by her skilful management, half a crown's worth of
rings are saved ; and Mr. Rushworth, to whom the part
suitable to his intellect is assigned, is desperately trying
to learn his forty-two speeches, and is partly consoling
himself under the pangs of jealousy with the prospect of
appearing in a blue dress and a pink satin cloak. The
160 LIFE OF
billiard-room has been fitted up as a stage, and Sir
Thomas's sanctum has been turned upside down to
furnish a green-room. A rehearsal is going on : the
hand of Henry Crawford as Frederick is on the heart of
Maria as Agatha^ when Julia bursts in with the announce-
ment that Sir Thomas has returned and is in the hall
at that moment. The company disperses in dismay,
Frederick, however, even after the thunderbolt has fallen,
continuing to press the hand of Agatha to his heart. A
scene of comic agony ensues, and it reaches the climax
when Sir Thomas goes to indulge himself with a sight of
his own dear room.
" When tea was soon afterwards brought in, and Sir Thomas,
getting up, said that he found that he could not be any longer in
the house without just looking into his own dear room, every
agitation was returning. lie was gone before anything had been
said to prepare him for the change he must find there ; and a pause
of alarm followed his disappearance. Edmund was the first to
speak.
" ' Something must be done,' said he.
" ' It is time to think of our visitors,' said Maria, still feeling her
hand pressed to Henry Crawford's heart, and caring little for any-
thing else. ' Where did you leave Miss Crawford, Fanny ? '
" Fanny told of their departure, and delivered their message.
"'Then poor Yates is all alone,' cried Tom. 'I will go and
fetch him. lie will be no bad assistant when it all comes out.'
"To the theatre he went, and reached it just in time to witness
the first meeting of his father and his friend. Sir Thomas had been
a good deal surprised to find candles burning ni his room ; and on
casting his eye round it, to see other symptoms of recent habitation
and a general air of confusion in the furniture. The removal of the
book-case from the billiard-room door struck him especially, but he
had scarcely more than time to feel astonished at all this, before
there were sounds from the billiard-room to astonish them still
further. Some one was talking there in a \ery loud accent ; he did
JANE A USTEN. 151
not know the voice — more than talking — almost hallooing. He
stepped to the door, rejoicing at that moment in having the means
of immediate communication, and, opening it, found himself on the
stage of a theatre, and opposed to a ranting young man, who
appeared likely to knock him down backwards. At the very
moment of Yates perceiving Sir Thomas, and giving perhaps the
very best start he had eyer given in -the whole course of his
rehearsals, Tom Bertram entered at the other end of the room ; and
never had he found greater difficulty in keeping his countenance.
His father's looks of solemnity and amazement on this, his first
appearance on any stage, and the gradual metamorphosis of the
impassioned Baron Wildenheim into the well-bred and easy Mr.
Yates, making his bow and apology to Sir Thomas Bertram, was
such an exhibition, such a piece of true acting, as he would not have
lost upon any account. It would be the last — in all probability —
the last scene on that stage ; but he was sure there could not be a
finer. The house would close with the greatest eclat."
After this Henry Crawford takes flight, leaving Maria
Bertram in the lurch. Her father, who sees that Mr.
Rushworth is a man whom she cannot and does not
love, offers to get her released from the engagement.
But pride and resentment forbid her to let Henry
Crawford think that she renounces a grand establishment
for the sake of one who has played with her and
deserted her. Nor can she endure the renewed restraint
of her father's presence. She assures Sir Thomas that
she does not wish to break off her engagement, and she
is married with due pomp and elegance to Mr. Rush-
worth, the service being impressively read by Dr. Grant.
" In all the important preparations of the mind she was
complete ; being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of
home, restraint, and tranquillity ; by the misery of dis-
appointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to
152 LIFE OF
marry. The rest might wait. The preparations of new
carriages and furniture might wait for London and
spring, when her own taste could have fairer play."
There is not a severer touch in Jane Austen's works.
After the wedding the pair go to Brighton, taking Julia
with them.
Fanny Price is now the only young lady at Mansfield
Park, and is brought from the background into the fore-
ground. Sir Thomas is struck with the improvement in
her appearance. She has been prettily called by Miss
Sarah Tytler a white violet, and the white violet has now
attained the fulness of its beauty and fragrance. Her
dear sailor brother having come to visit her, a ball is
given for her and him at Mansfield, to the surprise and
disgust of Mrs. Norris, whose malice grudges her any
pleasure or promotion.
Miss Crawford has remained at Mansfield, and Henry
Crawford has unexpectedly joined her. He is assiduous
in cultivating his intimacy with the family at the Park.
At last Sir Thomas cannot avoid perceiving " in a grand
and careless way," that Mn Crawford is somewhat dis-
tinguishing his niece. After a dinner-party at the
parsonage he " begins to think that any one in the habit
of such idle observations would have thought that Mr.
Crawford was the admirer of Fanny Price." He divines
rightly. Plenry Crawford, who set out, as he averred to
his light-minded sister, with the intention only of
breaking a heart for his amusement, has fallen seriously
and deeply in love with Fanny Price. Not only do the
beauty, the freshness and tenderness of the white violet
attract him, but loose as was his own character, he has
JANE A USTEN. 153
the sense, and not only the sense, but a sufficient
remnant of moral salt in his nature to value character in
a wife. His sister, in whom there is the same mixture
of good with bad qualities which there is in him, not-
withstanding Fanny's want of fortune and position,
heartily approves and backs his suit. She conjures into
the hands of Fanny before the ball a necklace which is
really her brother's gift. The necklace is intended to
support a cross brought as a present to Fanny by her
brother William : but it does not fit the cross ; a plain
gold chain given by Edmund does. By way of opening
a sure road to Fanny's heart, Henry Crawford obtains
through his uncle, the immoral old admiral, her brother
William's promotion in the navy, and himself brings her
the joyful news. He declares his love to Fanny, who is
all astonishment and confusion. She refuses him on the
spot. Still he perseveres, and ardently presses his suit,
pride conspiring with love to make him impatient of
rejection. His suit is backed by Sir Thomas, who has a
solemn interview with Fanny, in which he makes her
wretched by intimating that to refuse so perfect a gentle-
man, who is also master of Everingham and four thou-
sand a year, would be an act on her part not only of
extreme folly but of undutifulness. Little knowing what
has happened, or what is to come, he says that he would
gladly have given Crawford either of his own daughters.
To complete Fanny's misery, Edmund also urges her to
look favourably on the offer of the man whose sister he
still hopes to make his wife, showing thereby more
plainly than ever that her own love of himself is hope-
less. Crawford puts forth all his powers of charming,
154 LIFE OF
and he has made himself so agreeable, and his real
merits are such that, convinced as Fanny has been by
many indications that his character is corrupt, we are led
to surmise that he might have prevailed in the end had
not Fanny's heart been guarded by the other attachnrent,
which, though hopeless, is still strong. As it is she
steadily rejects him, and he at last takes his departure,
still, however, refusing to despair, and encouraged by
Sir Thomas in the belief that Fanny will presently
change her mind. He is evidently intended to be
represented as having depth of character of a certain
kind, and power of appreciating moral as well as physical
beauty.
Edmund Bertram has taken the step on the conse-
quences of which depends, as he thinks, the happiness
of his life. He has been ordained, a ceremony which
appears to have been regarded in those days with much
less awe than it is now, inasmuch as he, who would have
been scrupulous, if any one would, had danced at a ball
a few days before. Will Mary Crawford now discard
liim, or will she quell her ambition, overcome her
prejudices, and remain true to the man whom it is
evident that, woman of the world and wanting in
principle as she is, she has the grace sincerely to love ?
She has not made up her mind. Every day Fanny is
expecting to hear that Edmund has been accepted by
Mary, and that the doom of her own heart is sealed.
But still she does not hear it. Edmund's enthralment,
however, is still complete. Mary Crawford cannot help
showing, and he cannot help seeing, what is bad in her ;
but he sets it all down to education and circumstance.
JANE AUSTEN. 165
Her enchantments prevail : he makes up his mind that
lie will be miserable without her, and fervently presses
his suit, still pouring his confidences into the sisterly
bosom, as he takes it to be, of Fanny, and filling that
bosom with agony thereby.
Sir Thomas Bertram condescends to a stratagem.
He ordains that Fanny shall pay a visit to her family,
whom she has not seen all these years, and who are
living at Portsmouth. His ostensible reason is that she
owes this duty to affection. His real reason is that
after spending a few weeks in the house of a poor
Lieutenant of Marines and his wife, she will know what
poverty is, and see how great a mistake she would be
making if she refused the owner of Everingham. She
accordingly goes down to Portsmouth with her sailor
brother William, who was staying at Mansfield. In one
respect Sir Thomas's anticipations are thoroughly ful-
filled. Fanny does see what poverty is. The " trollopy "
servant-girl by whom she is received at the door is an
in lex to the character of the establishment. The home
which she has been longing to see again is the abode of
noise, dirt, disorder, and impropriety. The father for
whose embrace she yearned is coarse, vulgar, given to
drinking spirits and to swearing. He receives his
daughter almost with indifference. Her mother is
slatternly, a bad manager, and ahvays struggling with
the sordid cares and difficulties which her want of
control over her household and household affairs
creates. Fanny's brothers and sisters are an ill-bred,
untrained, quarrelsome crew, and their din which
resounds through the httle house is insufferable. The
156 LIFE OF
house is comfortless as well as small, and the cookery
of Rebecca is such that Sir Thomas's cure is in some
danger of killing the patient. The only redeeming part
of the picture is the character of Susan Price, in whom
a better nature than that of her brothers and sisters
shows itself, and who is reclaimed and civilized by
Fanny. The heart of Fanny does indeed turn away
from a home of poverty to one of wealth, order, elegance
and luxury. But it yearns for Mansfield Park and not
for Everingham.
At Portsmouth she receives a visit from Henry
Crawford, whose perseverance, considering that Fanny's
attractions are largely moral, we cannot but admire.
He once more exerts his powers of fascination, and he
has a special opportunity of showing his good breeding
and gentlemanly tact by a behaviour to the Price
family which relieves Fanny from her natural fears of
disgrace and shame : for, though she wishes an end to
be put to Crawford's unwelcome suit, she does not wish
an end to be put to it by the vulgarity of her relations.
The visit is without result. While Henry Crawford is
talking of Everingham, Fanny listens with indifference :
she is all attention when he talks of Mansfield. Still it
seems that he would have a chance if Edmund married
Mary Crawford.
But Edmund does not marry Mary Crawford. She
has now got back to London, and is again under the
influence of her fashionable and aristocratic set. In
the vortex of fast society her worldly ambition gets the
upper hand of the love which had been bred in
Mansfield Parsonage. In a letter to Fanny, Edmund
JANE AUSTEN. 157
saj's that after seeing Mary in London he has returned
to Mansfield in a less assured state than when he left it.
Still, he has not received a final answer, and if Mary
could only be detached from Lady Stornoway, Mrs.
Fraser, and the rest of the fast set, there would be hope.
Edmund cannot give Mary up : " she is the only woman
in the world of whom he would ever think as a wife."
He can the less bear the thought of renouncing her
because he would at the same time be renouncing the
society of the others who were the most dear to him,
since the loss of Mary would, as he fancies, be the loss
of Henry Crawford and of Fanny.
Edmund's elder brother, the sporting and dissipated
Tom, falls dangerously ill. Mary Crawford writes to
Fanny to inquire whether he is likely to die, showing
plainly that if he does, and if Edmund comes in for
the title and the estate, this will make all the difference
in the state of her affections. After this we give up
Mary for ever.
Now comes a crash which brings with it the catas-
trophe. In London Henry Crawford again meets Maria
Bertram, now Mrs. Rushworth, who, with a husband she
cannot love and of whom she cannot help being
ashamed, is unhappy amidst her grandeur. She falls
into the arms of her old lover, who has not principle
enough to resist the temptation. They run away
together. At the same time Julia sympathetically
elopes with the objectionable Mr. Yates. Fanny is
recalled to Mansfield as the only angel of comfort in
a house overwhelmed with misery and shame. The
Rushworths are divorced, and as Sir Thomas refuses
158 LIFE OF
to receive Maria at Mansfield, Mrs. Norris, whose
handiwork as a matchmaker has thus come to hideous
ruin, leaves Mansfield and goes to spend in retirement
with her Maria the rest of their clouded lives.
Since the affair of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth,
Edmund has seen Mary Crawford, and she has spoken
of the matter in a tone of such revolting levity and
immorality, thinking only of the folly, not of the guilt,
and proposing a solution almost as bad as the crime
itself, that he has not been able any longer to blind
himself to her real character, and has at once cast her
off for ever. There has been a stormy scene between
them, in which not only the heartlessness but the
insolence of the woman of the world has shown itself,
though as Edmund was leaving the room her love once
more struggled for the mastery, and she showed an
inclination to call him back, to which he did not
respond.
Edmund is now thrown back on the sisterly affection
of Fanny. As a wife, he still thinks that no other
woman but Mary Crawford will do for him. In
time, and after much experience of Fanny as a com-
forter, he finds that a woman of another sort will do.
They are married. Dr. Grant is promoted to a stall
at Westminster, where he dies of apoplexy brought on
by a course of institutionary dinners. Edmund and
Fanny are installed in Mansfield Parsonage. Sir
Thomas is consoled in his old age, and Susan
Price takes Fanny's place with Lady Bertram.
Among the subordinate characters, the most notable
is that of Mrs. Norris. Short of criminality, nothing
JANE AUSTEN. 159
can be more odious; nor has Jane Austen painted
anything which we should say was more worthy of
hatred. Mrs. Norris is harsh, ill-natured, mean, and
artful. Her mind is thoroughly low. She affects
benevolence, but takes care that her good works
shall be done at the cost of others. Her behaviour
to poor Fanny is execrable, and one wonders that
Sir Thomas can overlook it, or fail " in his solemn
musings " to see what she is, notwithstanding all
her professions of devotion to his interest. She
cackles over her grand triumph in preventing a poor
boy who has come on an errand from getting his
dinner in the servants' hall. She is thievish withal :
after the catastrophe of the theatricals she makes off
with the green baize curtain, and after the wedding
she filches the supernumerary jellies. Feeling that she
ought to send a present to the nephews and nieces
whom she has not seen for a number of years, she
balances between two old prayer-books, and at last
cannot make up her mind to part with either. There
is nothing in her not thoroughly selfish except her
doting fondness for her two Bertram nieces, which is
itself closely connected with her own vanity, and which
leads them both to ruin. Yet what character is
dearer to us than Mrs. Norris? What would even
" Mansfield Park " be without her? It is to the bad
characters in novels and plays that we are indebted
after all for the excitement and the fun.
Between the character of Mrs. Norris and that of her
sister Lady Bertram, there is peihaps a rather unnatural
gap. Nor are the indolence, apathy, and mental vacancy
IGO LIFE OF
of Lady Bertram kept quite within the bounds of
creduHty even when all allowance is made for a life
spent in the lap of ease and luxury. With regard to
these comic characters, however, we must repeat that the
features of the comic mask, to produce an effect, must
be exaggerated. Lady Bertram's passive faultlessness in
all the relations of life is skilfully sustained. It appears
in her reception of her husband after his return from the
West Indies.
"By not one of the circle was he listened to with such unbroken,
unalloyed enjoyment as by his wife, who was really extremely happy
to see him, and whose feelings were so warmed by his sudden
arrival, as to place her nearer agitation than she had been for the
last twenty years. She had been almost fluttered for a few minutes,
and still remained so sensibly animated as to put away her work,
move pug from her side, and give all her attention and all the rest
of her sofa to her husband. She had no anxieties for anybody to
cloud her pleasure : her own time had been irreproachably spent
during his absence : she had done a great deal of carpet work, and
made many yards of fringe ; and she would have answered as freely
for the good conduct and useful pursuits of all the young people as
for her own. It was so agreeable to her to see him again, and hear
him talk, to have her ear amused and her whole comprehension
filled by his narratives, that she began particularly to feel how
dreadfully she must have missed him, and how impossible it would
have been for her to bear a lengthened absence."
Lady Bertram's letter to Fanny upon the dangerous
illness of Tom Bertram is a counterpart as a self revela-
tion to the letters of Mr, Collins in " Pride and Pre-
judice."
" ' This distressing intelligence, as you may suppose,' observed
her ladyship, after giving the substance of it, ' has agitated us
exceedingly, and we cannot prevent ourselves from beii g greatly
JANE AUSTEN. 161
alarmed and apprehensive for the poor invalid, whose state Sir
Thomas fears may be very critical ; and Edmund kindly proposes
attending his brother immediately, but I am happy to add that Sir
Thomas will not leave me on this distressing occasion, as it would
be too trying for me. We shall greatly miss Edmund in our small
circle, but I trust and hope he will find the poor invalid in a less
alarming state than might be apprehended, and that he will be able
to bring him to Mansfield shortly, which Sir Thomas proposes
should be done, and thinks best on every account, and I flatter
myself the poor sufferer will soon be able to bear the removal with-
out material inconvenience or injury. As I have little doubt of your
feeling for us, my dear Fanny, under these distressing circumstances,
I will write again very soon.'"
We measure the extent of the disasters which have
fallen upon the family by their effect in overcoming the
apathy of Lady Bertram. Fanny {on her return from
Portsmouth to Mansfield) had scarcely passed the solemn-
looking servants when Lady Bertram came from the
drawing-room to meet her : came with no indolent step,
and falling on her neck, said, " Dear Fanny, now I shall
be comfortable."
A fine stroke of art is the character of the third sister,
Mrs. Price. She resembles by nature more the easy and
indolent Lady Bertram than the bustling and managing
Mrs. Norris. Her imprudent marriage has forced her
into the management of a poor and troublesome house-
hold, for which she is quite unfit. "Her days were
spent in a kind of slow bustle ; always busy without
getting on ; always behindhand, and lamenting it
without altering her ways ; wishing to be an economist
without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her
servants without skill to make them better, and whether
helping or reprimanding or indulging them, without any
II
1G2 LIFE OF
power of engaging their respect." " She might have
made just as good a woman of consequence as Lady
Bertram, but Mrs. Norris would have been a more
respectable mother of more children on a small income."
A bit of justice, by the way, is here done even to Mrs.
Norris, who had energy and management, if she had
nothing else. It is a fine touch in the description of
Mrs. Price that "her voice resembled the soft monotony
of Lady Bertram's, only worn into fretfulness.''
There is nothing in Zola more realistic, if that some-
what disagreeable word must be used, than the descrip-
tion of the Price household :
" She (Fanny) was deep in other musing. Tlie remembrance of
her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper,
came across her. No candle was iiaio wanted. The sun was yet
an hour and a half above the horizon. She felt that she had,
indeed, been three months there ; and the sun's rays falling strongly
into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy,
for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and
ill the country. Here, its power was only a glare ; a stifling, sickly
glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise
have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a
town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving
dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by
her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers,
where stood the tea-board, never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and
saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in
thin blue, and tlie bread and butter growing every minute more
greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it. Her father
read his newspaper, and her mother lamented over the ragged
carpet as usual, while the tea was in preparation, and wished
Rebecca would mend it."
This series of scenes, however, though it vies with
JANE AUSTEN. 163
Zola in realism, has nothing of Zola's repulsiveness, and
it is relieved by a touch of pathos :
"Fanny was silent ; but not from being convinced that there might
not be a remedy found for some of these evils. As she now sat
lool'iing at Betsey, she could not but think particularly of another
sister, a very pretty little girl, whom she had left there not much
younger when she went into Northamptonshire, who had died a few
years afterwards. There had been something remarkably amiable
about her. Fanny in those early days had preferred her to Susan ;
and when the news of her death had at last reached Mansfield, had
for a short time been quite afflicted. The sight of Betsey brought the
image of little Mary back again, but she would not have pained her
mother by alluding to her for the world. While considering her with,
these ideas, Betsey, at a small distance, was holding out something
to catch her eyes, meaning to screen it at the same time from
Susan's.
" ' What have you got there, my love ? ' said Fanny, * come and
show it to me.'
" It was a silver knife. Up jumped Susan, claiming it as her
own, and trying to get it away ; but the child ran to her mother's
protection, and Susan could only reproach, which she did very
warmly, and evidently hoping to interest Fanny on her side. ' It
was very hard that she was not to have her oivii knife ; it was her
own knife ; little sister Mary had left it to her upon her death-bed,
and she ought to have had it to keep herself long ago. But
mamma kept it from her, and was always letting Betsey get hold
of it ; and the end of it would be that Betsey would spoil it, and
get it for her own, though mamma had promised her that Betsey
should not have it in her own hands.'
"Fanny was quite shocked. Every feeling of duty, honour,
and tenderness, was wounded by her sister's speech and her mother's
reply.
" 'Now, Susan,' cried Mrs. Price, in a complaining voice, 'now,
how can you be so cross ? You are always quarrelling about that
knife, I wish you would not be so quarrelsome. Poor little
Betsey ; how cross Susan is to you ! But you should not have taken
it out, my dear, when I sent you to the drawer. You know I told
164 LIFE OF
)'0U not to touch it, because Susan is so cross about it. I must hide
it another time, Betsey. Poor Mary little thought it would be such
a bone of contention when she gave it me to keep, only two hours
before she died. Poor little soul ! she could but just speak to be
heard, and she said so prettily, " Let sister Susan have my knife,
mamma, when I am dead and buried." Poor little dear! she was
so fond of it, Fanny, that she would have it lie by her in bed, all
through her illness. It was the gift of her good godmother, old
Mrs. Admiral Maxwell, only six weeks before she was taken for
death. Poor little sweet creature ! Well, she was taken away
from evil to come. My own Betsey (fondling her), you have not
the luck of such a good godmother. Aunt N orris lives too far oft
to think of such little people as you.' "
It has been said that in the character of Lieutenant
Price, and in that of Admiral Crawford, Jane Austen,
devoted as she was to the navy, has shown her impar-
tiality by letting us see the bad side of the profession.
Admiral Crawford, however, though he is a power of evil
in the distance, does not come upon the scene, and his
keeping a mistress has nothing to do with his profession.
Lieutenant Price is not a sailor, but a marine. However,
it will be observed that Lieutenant Price, though sadly
fallen in moral and menial as well as in material estate,
still has the gentleman in him, and can show that he has
when the remnant of his self-respect is roused by contact
with Henry Crawford.
That Jane Austen introduced real persons of her
acquaintance into her novels and made game of them,
we may be sure is a baseless surmise. Her comic
characters are, like those of Molifere, thoroughly generic,
with only enough of individual feature to constitute
personality. Much less can we suppose her capable of
that vilest and most cowardly of all kinds of libelling
JANE AUSTEN. 165
which consists in traducing living and recognizable
persons under fictitious names. But there is nothing to
hinder our believing that those whom she loved appear
in her pages. Her sister Cassandra is certainly there, if
not as a distinct portrait, as a general model of tender-
ness combined with good sense and of sisterly affection.
Nor can we doubt that, in " Mansfield Park," William,
Fanny's sailor brother, represents one of the sailor
brothers of Jane Austen. A particular incident marks
the connection. William brings Fanny a cross as a
present. In one of her letters Jane Austen says,
"Charles has received ;^3o for his share of the pri-
vateer, and expects ;!^io more ; but of what avail is it to
take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his
sisters? He has been buying gold chains and topaz
crosses for us. He must be well scolded." A fine
picture of the noble profession, with its frankness, its
devotion to duty, its cheerfulness under perils and hard-
ships, the character of William is :
" William was often called on by his unele to be the talker. His
recitals were amusing in themselves to Sir Thomas, but the chief
object in seeking them was to understand the reciter, to know the
young man by his histories ; and he listened to his clear, simple,
spirited details with full satisfaction, seeing in them the proof of
good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage, and
cheerfulness, everything that could deserve or promise well.
Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He
had been in the Mediterranean ; in the West Indies ; in the Medi-
terranean again; had been often taken on shore by the favour of his
captain, and in the course of seven years had known every variety
of danger which sea and war together could offer. With such
means in his power he had a right to be listened to ; and though
Mrs. Norris could fidget about the room, and disturb everybody in
166 LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN.
quest of two needlefuls of thread or a second-hand shirt button, in
the midst of her nephew's account of a shipwreck or an engage-
ment, everybody else was attentive ; and even Lady Bertram could
not hear of such horrors unmoved, or without sometimes lifting her
eyes from her work to say, 'Dear me ! how disagreeable ! I wonder
anybody can ever go to sea.'
" To Henry Crawford they gave a different feeling. He longed
to have been at sea, and seen and done and suffered as much. His
heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and he felt tlie highest respect
for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily
hardships, and given such proofs of mind. The glory of heroism,
of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of
selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast ; and he wished he
had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his
way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and
happy ardour, instead of what he was ! ''
No more exquisite tribute to the boy's heroic calling
could be imagined than the self-reproach with which
this brilliant and idolized man of the world listens to
William's artless narrative.
CHAPTER VII.
PERSUASION " was the last work of Miss Austen.
When it was written the hand of death was upon
her, and when the last touch was put to it she was very
near her end. We can therefore hardly help applying in
some measure to herself what she says of Lady Elliot,
that " she had found enough in her duties, her friends,
and her children to attach her to life and make it no
matter of indifference to her when she was called on to
quit them." That she would feel the value of life, and
yet quit it with resignation, is what we should expect
of a character like Jane Austen. There is also a passage
on the melancholy charms of autumn which reminds us
the writer's leaf was falling into the sere, though it is fol-
lowed and relieved by an allusion to the farmer ploughing
in hope of the spring. Perhaps there is a shade of pen-
siveness over the whole novel, and in parts an increased
tenderness of sentiment such as comes with the evening
hour. " Persuasion " has had passionate admirers in two
persons not unqualified to judge— Miss Martineau and
Miss Mitford. Though as a whole not so well con-
structed as others of Jane Austen's novels, it may be
said to contain the finest touches of her art. Its
168 LIFE OF
principal character, the tender, sensitive, and sufifering
Anne EUiot, is also perhaps the most interesting of Jane
Austen's women, setting aside the totally different charm
of the blooming and joyous Emma. The title denotes
the gentle influences which persuade an injured and
resentful lover after the lapse of years to return to his
early love. Anne Elliot is the second daughter of Sir
Walter Elliot, of Kellynch, a baronet absurdly proud of
his title and inflated with a ridiculous sense of his own
consequence. Sir Walter is a widower. The eldest
daughter, Elizabeth, is the beauty and her father's pride ;
Mary is married to Charles Musgrove, heir to a large
estate; and Anne, in spite or rather because of her
refinement of mind and sweet gentleness of character,
is the Cinderella of the family. When the baronet
and Elizabeth go to town for the season, Anne is left at
home. A few years before she had been a very pretty
girl, but her bloom had vanished early, as much from
sadness as from lapse of years, and " as even when it was
at its height her father had found little to admire in mild
dark eyes and delicate features, which had nothing in
common with his own, he could think nothing of her
when she was faded and thin, and moreover could no
longer be expected to add by marriage to the honours of
his family tree." She is, however, appreciated by Lady
Russell, the great friend of her mother and counsellor of
the family, who lives near Kellynch. Seven years before,
her troth had been plighted to Captain Wentworth, of the
Navy ; but she had rather weakly allowed the match to
be broken off, yielding chiefly to the argument that it
would be injurious to Captain Wentworth, who was then
JANE A USTEN. 169
just entering on his profession and had his future to
make. Lady Russell, wise and good, but not infallible,
had the principal hand in the business. Anne has, how-
ever, kept the image of Captain Wentworth in her heart,
has loved no one else, has rejected Charles Musgrove,
whom her sister afterwards married, and feels at twenty-
seven that she was ill-advised at nineteen. Captain
Wentworth in the meantime has risen in his profession,
has made money by captures in the war, and is now
anxious to marry. Anne, whose weakness he resents,
he has cast out of his heart, only retaining her image as
that of the sort of woman whom he desires for a wife. Sir
Walter Elliot, in trying to keep up his state as a baronet,
gets into debt, and as he finds it impossible to retrench
on the scene of his grandeur, lets Kellynch Hall, which
is taken by Admiral Croft, whose wife is the sister of
Captain Wentworth. "A few months more, and he^
perhaps, may be walking here."
Sir Walter goes off to Bath, taking with him his
eldest daughter and a Mrs. Clay, a widow, the daughter
of his solicitor, a sinister personage who, though she has
freckles, is fascinating as well as designing. The despised
and neglected Anne is for the present left behind, to pass
her time first at Uppercross, where her sister Mary
and her brother-in-law, Charles Musgrove, inhabit the
cottage, and old Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove with their
two daughters, Henrietta and Louisa, inhabit the
mansion, and afterwards at the house of Lady Russell.
Captain Wentworth of course appears upon the scene :
he comes to stay with the Crofts at Kellynch Hall, and
Anne's heart at once tells her that he is all that he ever
170 LIFE OF
was to her. But the man, passing an active and adven-
turous Hfe at sea, has had a good deal more to efface
his impressions. He meets his former love with cold
politeness, and Anne soon hears that he has said of her
that she was so changed in looks that he would not
have known her. She, alas ! cannot say the same about
him, and here again the man has the advant.ige. Their
intercourse continues, and in the description of its
incidents, and of the feelings of Anne, Jane Austen's
highest art is exerted. Captain Wentworth avows him-
self anxious to marry. Henrietta and Lousia Musgrove,
both of them charming, though not like Anne ElHot, are
ready to fall into his arms. He seems at first to prefer
Henrietta ; but at last Anne, looking on with throbbing
heart, is convinced that he has fixed upon Louisa. A
party of pleasure is made to Lyme, where they meet the
interesting Captain Benwick, a naval officer who is in
melancholy retirement, having lost his betrothed. There
also they fall in by accident with Mr. William Elliot, a
gentleman who has hitherto appeared in the background
as the heir-presumptive to Sir Walter's baronetcy, but
on bad terms with Sir Walter and his family, being
loaded with the triple guilt of failing to marry Elizabeth,
who was destined for him, marrying another woman,
wealthy but of low family, and speaking contemptuously
of the title and its wearer. He has recently lost his
objectionable wife. Mr. William Elliot does not recog-
nize Anne and her party, nor do they, till he is gone, find
out who he is ; but he is evidently struck with Anne, and
gazes at her with an earnest admiration, of which she
could not be insensible. " She was looking remarkably
JANE AUSTEN. 171
well ; her very regular, very pretty features having the
bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind
which had been blowing on her complexion, and by
the animation of eye which it had also produced. It
was evident that the gentleman admired her exceedingly.
Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a
way which showed his noticing of it. He gave her a
momentary glance — a glance of brightness, which seemed
to say, ' That man is struck with you — and even I, at
this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.' "
For the present, however. Captain Wentworth's heart
appears to be carried strongly in another direction.
Louisa Musgrove, while he is jumping her down some
steps, falls, gives herself a serious blow on the head, is
carried off senseless, and lies long between life and
death. In the scenes which ensue, Anne shows her
superiority of sense and self-possession. Wentworth's
manner, however, on the afflicting occasion is that of a
devoted lover, and Anne, when she goes off with Lady
Russell to join her father and sister at Bath, regards him
as lost to her and affianced to another, so that there is
nothing left for her but perpetual widowhood of the
heart. At Bath, where Sir Walter and Elizabeth, with
the designing Mrs. Clay, are established in sufficient
dignity in Camden Place, Mr. William Elliot again
appears, and soon begins to lay close siege to Anne.
He is apparently a most eligible gentleman, socially
accomplished and with much charm of manner. He is
also wealthy, and the heir to the baronetcy, and to Kel-
lynch. He might succeed if the fort were not held against
him by another, though now hopeless, attachment.
172 LIFE OF
Suddenly, in the postscript of a letter from Mary,
comes the surprising announcement that not Captain
Wentworth, but Captain Benwick is engaged to Louisa
Musgrove, over whom he has been hanging in her pro-
tracted struggle for life at Lyme. It is a curious turn
of affairs, especially as Captain Benwick's movements
had for a moment created a false impression that he had
fixed his eyes on Anne herself. As "there was fine
naval fervour to begin with," Anne sees no reason why
the pair should not be happy, while the vista of happi-
ness which had seemed finally closed, opens again to her.
Captain Wentworth comes to Bath, and the reason of
his coming presently appears, though the suspense is
still kept up and the gradual manifestation of returning
love is managed with much art. After a certain inter-
view with him, " Anne said nothing, thought nothing of
the brilliancy of the room. Her happiness was from
within. Her eyes were bright, and her cheeks glowed ;
but she knew nothing about it. She was thinking only
of the last half-hour, and as they passed to their seats her
mind took a hasty range over it. His choice of subjects,
his expressions, and still more his manner and his look,
had been such as she could see in only one light. His
opinion of Louisa Musgrove's inferiority, an opinion
which he had seemed solicitous to give, his wonder at
Captain Benwick, his feelings as to a first, strong attach-
ment— sentences begun which he could not finish, his
half-averted eyes and more than half-expressive glance —
all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at
last ; that anger, resentment, avoidance were no more ;
and that they were succeeded not merely by friendship
JANE AUSTEN. 173
and regard, but by the tenderness of the past — yes, some
share of the tenderness of the past. She could not
contemplate the change as implying less. He must love
her." Before long, matters have reached such a point,
that " prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal
constancy could never have passed along the streets of
Bath than Anne was sporting with from Camden Place
to Westgate Buildings. It was almost enough to spread
purification and perfume all the way." Mr. William
Elliot is still there, but Anne falls in with a Mrs. Smith,
a widow to whose husband Mr. Elliot had behaved
badly, learns from her his history, and is assured that he
is "a man without heart or conscience, a designing,
wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself;
who, for his own interest and ease, would be guilty of
any cruelty or any treachery that could be perpetrated
without risk of his general character." His object, it
seems, is partly to countermine the projects of Mrs.
Clay, who is still staying at Sir Walter ElUot's, and if
she could induce the Baronet to marry her, might cut the
heir-presumptive out of the title and estate. This puts
him out of the field. Still Captain Wentworth's declara-
tion hangs fire. It comes, at last, in the form of a letter
declaring that he loves Anne more than when she almost
broke his heart eight years before. At Lyme, he says,
he had received more than one lesson. Mr. EUiot's
passing admiration had roused him, and Anne's conduct
on the occasion of Louisa's accident had fixed her
superiority in his mind. He is of course accepted with
rapture. The Baronet, considering Wentworth's twenty-
five thousand pounds and his name, thinks him good
174 LIFE OF
enough for Anne, and is willing to insert his name in the
Baronetage as that of her husband. Mr. William
Elliot and Mrs. Clay go off to the places appointed for
them, and " Persuasion " has done its work.
Of the minor characters the most amusing is Sir
Walter Elliot, with his ridiculous family pride and self-
importance, and the meanness of soul by which they
are naturally accompanied. The scene is very good iw.
which, with the agony of a monarch abdicating his
throne, he consents to let Kellynch Hall, treating his
tenant as a person who is receiving an immense favour,
and who will receive a vast accession of consequence at
his hands. He is comforted by the thought that the
Hall is let to an Admiral, not to a Mr. ; because a Mr.
requires explanation, whereas an Admiral bespeaks his
own consequence and at the same time can never make
a Baronet look small. He drives off " prepared with con-
descending bows for all the afthcted tenantry and cottagers
who might have had a hint to show themselves." The
picture of his social Hfe at Bath, in reduced grandeur
but with unreduced pretensions, is very good, and
nothing can be more natural than the manner in which
he combines with airs of supreme insolence towards all
whom he thinks below him in rank, servile worship of
those who are above him, such as Lady Dalrymple and
her daughter. His personal vanity is as great as his
family pride. Here is a scene in which it is played off :
"Mr. Elliot, and his friends in Marlborough Buildings, were talked
of the whole evening. ' Colonel Wallis had been so impatient to
be introduced to them ; and Mr. Elliot so anxious that he should ; '
and there was a Mrs. Wallis, at present known only to them by
JANE A USTEN. 175
description, as she was in daily expectation of her confinement ;
but Mr. Elliot spoke of her as 'a most charming woman, quite
worthy of being known in Camden Place,' and as soon as she re-
covered they were to be acquainted. Sir Walter thought much of
Mrs. Wallis; she was said to be an excessively pretty woman,
beautiful. ' He longed to see her. He hoped she might make some
amends for the many very plain faces he was continually passing
in the streets. The woist of Bath was the number of its plain
women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women,
but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had
frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would
be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights ; and once, as he
had stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven
women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable
face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp
frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test
of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly
women in Bath ; and as for the men ! they were infinitely worse.
Such scarecrows as the streets were full of ! It was evident how
little the women were used to the sight of anything tolerable, by
the effect which a man of decent appearance produced. He had
never walked anywhere arm-in-arm with Colonel Wallis (who was
a fine military figure, though sandy-haired) without observing that
every woman's eye was upon him ; every woman's eye was sure to
be upon Colonel Wallis.' Modest Sir Walter 1 He was not allowed
to escape, however. His daughter and Mrs. Clay united in hinting
that Colonel Wallis's companion might have as good a figure as
Colonel Wallis, and certainly was not sandy-haired."
Like Mr. Woodhouse's valetudinarianism, Sir Walter
Elliot's conceit is a little overdrawn. He is made to say
that he had given somebody a passport to society, by
being seen with him once in the House of Commons
and twice at Tattersall's. If he had belonged either to
the House gf Commons or to Tattersall's, he would have
had some of his conceit and insolence knocked out of
him. This a woman did not know.
176 LIFE OF
Anne's sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, are foils to Anne.
Elizabeth's coldness of heart and selfishness are touched
off in her response to her father's anxious inquiry about
the possibility of retrenchment. " To do her justice,
she had, in the first ardour of female alarm, set seriously
to think what could be done, and had finally proposed
these two branches of economy — to cut off some un-
necessary charities, and to refrain from new furnishing
the drawing-room ; to which expedients she afterwards
added the happy thought of their taking no present down
(from London) to Anne, as had been their usual yearly
custom," Mary's querulous and hypocritical self-love
is well painted in the scene in which she finds pretexts
for deserting her sick child to go to a dinner-party, and
leaving her sister to supply her place. She manages
to find in her maternal sensibilities an excuse for her
abandonment of a mother's duty. But her self-love, her
querulousness, and the silly inconsistency of her judg-
ments of people, always shifting with trivial impressions
of the hour, are together depicted in her letter to her
sister, which, as a stroke of art in the epistolary revela-
tion of character, forms a counterpart of Lady Bertram's
letter to Fanny in " Mansfield Park."
^'■February I .
" My dear Anne, — I make no apology for my silence, because
I know how little people think of letters in such a place as Bath.
You must be a great deal loo happy to care for Uppercross, which,
as you well know, affords little to write about. We have had a very
dull Christmas ; Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove have not had one dinner-
parly all the holidays. I do not reckon the Ilaytcrs as anybody.
The holidays, however, are over at last : I believe no children ever
had such long ones. I am sure I had not. The house was cleared
JANE AUSTEN. 177
yesterday, except of the little Harvilles ; but you will be surprised
to hear that they have never gone home. Mrs. Harville must be
an odd mother to part with them so long. I do not understand it.
They are not at all nice children, in my opinion ; but Mrs. Musgrove
seems to like them quite as well, if not better, than her grand-
children. What dreadful weather we have had ! It may not be
felt in Bath, with your nice pavements; but in the country it is
of some consequence. I have not had a creature call on me since
the second week in January, except Charles Hayter, who has been
calling much oftener than was welcome. Between ourselves, I think
it a great pity Henrietta did not remain at Lyme as long as Louisa ;
it would have kept her a little out of his way. The carriage is gone
to-day, to bring Louisa and the Harvilles to-morrow. We are not
asked to dine with them, however, till the day after, Mrs. Musgrove
is so afraid of her being fatigued by the journey, which is not very
likely, considering the care that will be taken of her ; and it would
be much more convenient to me to dine there to-morrow. I am
glad you find Mr. Elliot so agreeable, and wish I could be ac-
quainted with him too ; but I have my usual luck : I am always
out of the way when anything desirable is going on ; always the last
of my family to be noticed. WTiat an immense time Mrs. Clay has
been staying with Elizabeth ! Does she never mean to go away ?
But, perhaps, if she were to leave the room vacant, we might not
be invited. Let me know what you think of this. I do not expect
my children to be asked, you know. I can leave them at the Great
House very well, for a month or six weeks. I have this moment
heard that the Crofts are going to Bath almost immediately : they
think the Admiral gouty. Charles heard it quite by chance : they
have not had the civility to give me any notice, or offer to take any-
thing. I do not think they improve at all as neighbours. We see
nothing of them, and this is really an instance of gross inattention.
Charles joins me in love, and everything proper.
" Yours affectionately,
" Mary M .
" I am sorry to say that I am very far from well ; and Jemima
has just told me that the butcher says there is a bad sore-throat very
much about. I dare say I shall catch it ; and my sore-throats, you
know, are always worse than anybody's."
12
178 LIFE OF
So ended the first part, which had been afterwards put
into an envelope, containing nearly as much more.
" I kept my letter open, that I might send you word how Louisa
bore her journey, and now I am extremely glad I did, having a great
deal to add. In the first place, I had a note from Mrs. Croft yester-
day, offering to convey anything to you ; a very kind, friendly note
indeed, addressed to me, just as it ought ; I shall therefore be able
to make my letter as long as I like. The Admiral does not seem
very ill, and I sincerely hope Bath will do him all the good he
wants. I shall be truly glad to have them back again. Our
neighbourhood cannot spare such a pleasant family. But now for
Louisa. I have something to communicate that will astonish you
not a little. She and the Harvilles came on Tuesday very safely,
and in the evening we went to ask her how she did, when we were
rather surprised not to find Captain Benwick of the party, for he had
been invited as well as the Harvilles ; and what do you think was
the reason ? Neither more nor less than his being in love with
Louisa, and not choosing to venture to Uppercross till he had had an
answer from Mr. Musgrove ; for it was all settled between him and
her before she came away, and he had written to her father by
Captain Harville. True, upon my honour 1 Are you not as-
tonished ? I shall be surprised at least if you ever received a hint
of it, for I never did. Mrs. Musgrove protests solemnly that she
knew nothing of the matter. We are all very well pleased, how-
ever ; for though it is not equal to her marrying Captain Wentworth,
it is infinitely better than Charles Haytcr ; and Mr. Musgrove has
written his consent, and Captain Benwick is expected to-day. Mrs.
Harville says her husband feels a good deal on his poor sister's
account ; but, however, Louisa is a great favourite with both.
Indeed, Mrs. Harville and I quite agree that we love her the better
for having nursed her. Charles wonders what Captain Wentworth
will say ; but if you remember, I never thought him attached to
Louisa ; I never could see anything of it. And this is the end, you
see, of Captain Benwick's being supposed to be an admirer of yours.
How Charles could take such a thing into his head was always in-
comprehensible to me. I hope he will be more agreeable now.
JANE AUSTEN. 179
Certainly not a great match for Louisa Rlusgrove, but a million
times better than marrying among the Ilayters."
Admiral Croft is an "old tough," as admirals seem
to have been called in those days, drawn evidently from
the life by one who knew the navy well. When interro-
gated about the state of a friend, who it was suspected
had been wounded in his affections, he reassures the
inquirer by telHng him that the supposed sufferer had not
used a single oath. His wife, as seems to have been the
fashion at that time, has been a great deal at sea with
him ; she is a female " old tough " ; and the picture of
their strong though refined affection, drawn evidently
with hearty relish by Jane Austen, is an " old maid's "
tribute to the better state.
It has been already said that there are some weak-
nesses in the construction of the novel. Sir Walter
Elliot and Elizabeth, though they occupy a good deal
of space, contribute nothing or hardly anything to the
action. They are a little too like the mere character
pictures with which we are sometimes presented in
place of characters brought into play and developed by
the action of a well-constructed plot. Louisa Musgrove
on one side, and Mr. William Elliot on the other, serve
to add to the complexity and interest of the movement
by which Captain Wentworth is to be reunited to Anne.
But the destruction of William Elliot's character is need-
less, and strikes us as inartistic, while there is something
unnatural in his whole relation to the Elliot family, and
something strained in the account of his motives. The
purpose for which he is introduced and afterwards killed
180 LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN.
off is too obvious. The transfer of Louisa Musgrove
from Captain Wentworth to Captain Benwick, again, is
abrupt, and forced as well as sudden ; nor does Captain
Wentworth come quite clear out of the affair. The
description of Mrs. Clay's artfulness, and of her sinister
relation to the foolish baronet, leads us to expect some-
thing lively in that quarter ; but nothing comes, and Mrs.
Clay leaves the scene at last a "pale and ineffectual"
figure, without our being able to see with what object
she was brought upon it. Nor does Lady Russell,
though she seems intended for an important part, do
much more than solemnly seal by her ultimate approba-
tion the match which she had made a grand mistake in
breaking off.
CHAPTER VIII.
IT was natural that any one who had a manuscript of
Jane Austen in his possession should feel bound to
give it to the world. But Jane Austen herself did not
give " Lady Susan " to the world, nor can we imagine
that she would have approved or that she would not
have earnestly deprecated its publication. It is due to
her to remember that before her death she was re-
moved from Chawton to Winchester for medical advice,
leaving her papers no doubt at Chawton, so that she
could hardly have the opportunity in her last moments
of making a selection, or of destroying those which she
did not wish to see the light. " Lady Susan " is believed
by her family to have been a very early production. We
are willing to see in it a mere exercise which, when her
taste had improved, was laid aside. " Lady Susan " is
a novelette in the form of letters. It is truncated in
shape, though after a fashion it is complete. The
story which it briefly and not very clearly tells, is that of
a worthless though clever and fascinating woman who
carries on two love intrigues at once, one with a married
man, while in the case of the other she is eventually
supplanted in her lover's affections by her own daughter.
182 LIFE OF
She is at the same lime cruelly ill-treating her daughter,
and trying to force upon her as a husband a man whom she
hates. With that man, her two intrigues having clashed
and been wrecked by the collision, " Lady Susan "
ultimately herself takes up. Such a plot is worthy of a
Parisian novelist. Yet in reading " Lady Susan," though
you are surprised and repelled, you do not in the least
feel that the tastes or tendencies of the writer are
immoral. The very coldness and lifelessness of the
story preclude any imputation of that kind. The work,
we repeat, is best characterized as a mere exercise.
We have even thought that the plot may have been
borrowed, and that, in the unattractive web, the woof
alone may be Jane Austen's ; the warp may have been
the work of another hand. There is nothing that we
can see in this production giving promise of the later
works, unless the character of Lady Susan herself
uniting charms with vices may be regarded as a crude
and coarse germ of that of Mary Crawford.
"Sense and Sensibility" was at first, like "Lady
Susan," composed in the form of letters. The authoress
of "Evelina" adopted the same form. Both she and
Jane Austen were no doubt following Richardson, whom
Jane regarded with excessive admiration. We shudder
at the thought that a form so awkward for narration, and
so fruitful of prolixity and dulness, might have been that
of all Jane Austen's works. One of its special defects
is illustrated by "Lady Susan," the wicked woman of
which is made to write letters revealing her own character
and designs with an openness which, under a paternal
government, might have brought her into the hands of
JANE A USTEN. 183
the police. lago acknowledges his villany to himself,
but he does not disclose it to anybody else, much less
does he entrust the disclosure to the post-office. The
"Nouvelle Heloise" is not narrative or play of character;
it is at most a series of situations giving occasion to
effusions of sentiment.
It would be vain to ask that " Lady Susan " should
not be included in future editions of Jane Austen's
works ; but such, if she could be heard, would certainly
be the prayer of her shade.
" The Watsons " is the name given by those who
published it to a fragment to which the writer had not
given a name, and which she had not even divided into
chapters. The water-mark on the paper indicates that it
was written when she was living at Bath, and it appears
to have been the only product of those years. Assuredly
it is in the writer's mature style, and no girlish composi-
tion. It is evidently unelaborated as well as incomplete,
but it promises well, and we lament that the writer did
not finish it. Why she laid it aside is unknown : pro-
bably her work was interrupted by the social engagements
of Bath, and she lost interest or the thread was broken.
Her nephew's hypothesis is that she " became aware of
the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in such a
position of poverty and obscurity as, though not neces-
sarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to
degenerate into it, and therefore, like a singer who has
begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain."
It must be admitted that Jane Austen was " genteel," not
in the odious sense which the word now bears, but in
184 LIFE OF JANE A US TEN.
that which it bore in her own day. But the Watsons are
gentlefolk ; they go to a ball where they meet aristocracy,
though they go in a friend's carriage, not in their own,
and, though when aristocratic acquaintance call, Nanny
and the early dinner rather put the ladies to shame.
Emma Watson becomes an object of attention to a peer
and to another man of independent fortune at the same
time. It appears, from the outline of the plot which the
writer confided to her sister, that Emma was to dechne
an offer of marriage from a peer, and to marry a most
eligible clergyman. That the story was carrying her out
of the region of gentiUty, therefore, can hardly have
been Jane Austen's reason for laying it aside. " The
Watsons," as Mr. Austen-Leigh remarks, cannot have
been broken up for the purpose of using the materials in
another fabric. Mrs. Robert Watson, with her vulgar
airs of fashion, bears a strong resemblance to Mrs.
Elton; a faint likeness to Henry Crawford, as a gay
breaker of the hearts of women, may perhaps be
traced in Tom Musgrove ; and the querulous selfishness
of Margaret foreshadows that of Mary Musgrove. No
other affinities appear. Mr. Watson is, like Mr. Wood-
house, an invalid, but he is not a valetudinarian.
CHAPTER IX.
CRITICISM is becoming an art of saying fine things,
and tliere are really no fine things to be said about
Jane Austen. There is no hidden meaning in her ; no
philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to
bring to light ; nothing calling in any way for elaborate
interpretation. We read in a recent critique of a work
of fiction by Balzac, "Seraphita, the marvellous creature
whose passage from Matter to Spirit, from the Specialist
to the Divine conditions, is the theme of Balzac's genius,
in this case is intended to typify the final function of a
long course of steadfast upward working by a soul which
has, by many reincarnations, won its way past the In-
stinctive and Abstractive spheres of existence, and has at
length attained that delicate balance of the material and
spiritual which is the last possible manifestation on the
earthly plane." Jane Austen's characters typify nothing,
for their doings and sayings are familiar and common-
place. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and
commonplace intensely interesting and amusing. Perfect
in her finish and full of delicate strokes of art, her works
require to be read with attention, not skimmed as one
skims many a novel, that they may be fully enjoyed.
186 LIFE OF
But whoever reads them attentively will fully enjoy them
without the help of a commentator.
Some think that they see a difference between the
early and the later novels. It is natural to look for such
a difference, but for ourselves we must confess that we
see it not. In the first set and in the last set the style
appears to us to be the same; in both equally clear,
easy, and free from mannerism or peculiarity of any
kind. In both there is the same freedom from anything
like a straining after point and epigram, while point and
epigram are not wanting when there is natural occasion for
them. There are the same archness and the same quiet
irony. The view of life, society, and character is essentially
the same : at least, we should be surprised if any great
contradiction or variation could be produced. It has
been said that "Northanger Abbey" shows above all the
rest of the novels the freshness and briskness of youth,
and this has been ascribed to its having been out of the
hands of the writer, so that it could not, like its fellows
of the same epoch, undergo revision. It is, as we have
shown, a comic travesty of the romantic school : to its
satirical character its special friskiness is due. An
autumnal mellowness of tone and sentiment has been
discovered in "Persuasion." For this it has been
already said there seems to be some foundation : it
would be wonderful indeed if there were none. The
sound of the vesper bell is sometimes heard. Perhaps
there is something in the tender and suffering character
of Anne Elliot congenial to the melancholy of the
parting hour. Yet there are things fully as sharp and as
nearly verging on cynicism in ihc later novels as in the
JANE AUSTEN. 187
earlier. There is nothing more closely verging on
cynicism in the whole series than the passage in " Per-
suasion" mocking the "large fat sighs" of Mrs. Musgrove
over the early death of her worthless son.
There are novelists who seem to think that we can do
without a plot, provided they give us elaborate dehneations
of character or even picturesque descriptions of scenery.
But it is difficult, as we have already said, to create an
interest in character apart from action ; while picturesque
descriptions of scenery, except as the merest accessories,
become tedious, word-painting being, in fact, not painting
at all, but a draft on the imagination of the reader, who
has to put together a landscape in his mind's eye, out of
the verbal materials furnished him, and soon grows
weary of the effort. Walter Scott always gives us a good
plot, a plot at least which carries us on and excites our
interest in the actors. We have endeavoured to show by
analysis that in this respect Jane Austen is not wanting,
though in some of her plots there are weaknesses which
we have had occasion to mark. It is true, we say once
more, that her plots are very unlike those of a sensation
novel. Where the sensation novel gives us murder,
and perhaps carnage on a still larger scale, adulteries,
bigamies, desperate adventures and hairbreadth escapes,
she manages to amuse and almost to excite us with the
scrape into which Emma gets by her attempt to make a
match between Harriet and Mr. Elton, or the catastrophe
produced by the sudden return of Sir Thomas Bertram
in the midst of the theatricals at Mansfield Park.
Lord Brabourne has justly observed that the heroines
of Jane Austen's novels are better than the heroes. It
188 LIFE OF
could hardly fail to be so. It could hardly be given to
men or women to understand the character of the other
sex as thoroughly as that of their own. Shakespeare's
women are inferior in interest to his men with the single
exception of Lady Macbeth, who is more man than
woman, though she betrays her Avomanhood by breaking
down at last under the moral strain of conscious guilt,
while nothing can pierce her consort's heart but the
sword of Macduff. The phrase " heroes and heroines "
is objectionable in the case of novels in which there is
nothing heroic. But the principal figure, to use a more
suitable phrase, in each of Jane Austen's novels is not
a man, but a woman or a pair of women; in "Pride
and Prejudice" Elizabeth, in "Sense and Sensibility"
the sisters Elinor and Marianne, in " Northanger
Abbey" Catherine Morland, in "Emma" Miss Wood-
house, in " Mansfield Park " Fanny Price, in " Per-
suasion " Anne Elliot. Each of them has a very
distinct character, with a charm of its own, and is, we
have no doubt, a true woman. Of the principal male
figures hardly one can be said to have a very distinct
character except Darcy, and Darcy, as we have seen, is
made to do and say things which no man of his sup-
posed character and sense would do or say. Edward
Ferrars hardly has a character at all. There is nothing
very marked in those of Henry Tilncy or Edmund
Bertram ; nor does either of them, or any one of the
whole set, play any part which specially calls for the
male forces, qualities, or passions. Female critics greatly
admire Knightley, but the interest which we feel in
Knightley is derived not so much from anything striking
JANE AUSTEN. 189
in himself or in the part which he plays, as from his
being the natural supplement of Emma, the corrective
of her little faults and the support to which her charming
weakness clings. After all, the manufacture of heroes is
difficult. Perfection does not interest. Of all Scott's
heroes not one is interesting except the Master of Ravens-
wood, and in his case the interest is not so much that of
character as that of circumstance. It is in the secondary
characters of Jane Austen, the imperfect, the comic,
and even the bad that we delight. That the comic
characters are sometimes overdrawn has been already
admitted, and the apology has been given. There never
was a Tartuffe or a M. Jourdain any more than there
was a Mr. Collins or a Mr. Woodhouse, a General Tilney
or a Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and there is a basis in
human nature for the comic characters of Jane Austen
as well as for the comic characters of Moliere.
It is marvellous that Jane Austen's range being so
narrow she should have been able to produce such
variety. But narrow we must remember her range was,
and recurrences or partial recurrences of the same
characters and incidents are the consequence. We
cannot help seeing the likeness between Henry Tilney
and Edmund Bertram, while Edward Ferrars is a feeble
germ of both. We have several pairs of sisters, and
sisterly affection is a constant theme. There is a close
resemblance between Wickham and Willoughby, and a
considerable resemblance between both of them and
Henry Crawford. To say this may seem to be flying in
the face of Macaulay, who has said, " She [Jane Austen]
has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain
190 LIFE OF
sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day.
Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each
other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.
There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom
we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the
kingdom — Mr. Edward Ferrars, IMr. Henry Tilney, Mr.
Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all speci-
mens of the upper part of the middle class. They have
all been liberally educated. They all lie under the
restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all
young. They are all in love. Not one of them has
any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one
has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who
would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses
of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more
unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to
Sir Lucius O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's
young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost
all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude
analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and
that we know them to exist only by the general effect
to which they have contributed." But this eulogy, with
all deference be it said, however eloquent, will not bear
comparison with the facts. Henry Tilney shines more in
small talk than Edmund Bertram, and his figure catches
some of the special liveliness which pervades the travesty;
but otherwise the two characters might be transposed
without injury to either novel. Mr. Elton, on the other
hand, the clerical idol of school-girls, essentially low and
mean, with his vulgar and flashy wife, is distinguished
from Henry and Edmund by the broadest difference of
JANE A USTEN. 191
■ colour which Jane Austen's palette could supply. It
' may be added that neither Henry Tilney nor Edmund
Bertram belongs to the middle class; both of them belong
to the aristocracy, though each is a younger son.
In doing justice to Jane Austen and recommending
her in preference to the unwholesome products of sensa-
tionalism and the careless manufactures of literary hacks,
we do not mean to take a leaf from the crown of those
who have dealt with nobler and more entrancing themes.
The subjects which presented themselves to her were of
the kind with which, and with which alone, she was
singularly qualified by her peculiar temperament as well
as by her special gifts and her social circumstances to
deal. But the lives of these genteel idlers after all were
necessarily somewhat vapid, and void of anything heroic
in action or feeling as well as of violent passion or tragic
crime. Few sets of people, perhaps, ever did less
for humanity or exercised less influence on its progress
than the denizens of Mansfield Park and Pemberley,
Longbourn and Hartfield, in Jane Austen's day. As they
all come before us at the fall of the curtain, we feel that
they, their lives and loves, their little intrigues, their petty
quarrels, and their drawing-room adventures, are the
lightest of bubbles on the great stream of existence,
though it is a bubble which has been made bright for
ever by the genius of Jane Austen.
THE END.
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INDEX,
Admiralty, the, Jane Austen's
opinion of, 47
Austen, Cassandra(Jane's mother),
13
Austen, Cassandra (Jane's sister),
14, 18, 20, 32, 40
Austen, Admiral Charles (Jane's
brother), 13
Austen, Edward (Jane's brother),
13
Austen, Admiral Francis (Jane's
brother), 13
Austen, Rev. George (Jane's
father), 12, 30
Austen, Rev. Henry (Jane's
brother), 13, 23, 36
Austen, James (Jane's brother),
13
Austen, Jane, her literary posi-
tion, II ; scanty records of her
life, 12 ; her birth, 12 ; her father
and family, 12-14, 16-17 ; her
surroundings at Steventon, 14-
16 ; her home life and personal
appearance, 17 ; possible love |
affair, 18-20 ; limited literary
culture, 21-24 ; early works, 24 ;
" Pride and Prejudice," "Sense
and Sensibility, " ' ' Northanger
Abbey," 24-25 ; cheerfulness
under neglect of publishers, 25-
28 ; removal to Bath, 28 ; her
life there, 29-30 ; death of her
father, 30 ; removal to South-
ampton, 30 ; on old maids, 31 ;
on dress, 32 ; removal to Chaw-
ton, 33; "Emma," "Mans-
field Park," and " Persuasion,"
33 ; anonymous publication of
the novels, 33-4 ; their recep-
tion and incidents connected
therewith, 34-37 ; illness, 38-40 ;
death and burial in Winchester
Cathedral, 41 ; her letters, 42-
43 ; principles of conduct as
shown in the novels, 44-SS ;
materials of the novels, 56-65 ;
the novels regarded as a whole,
185-191 ; chronological relation
to other Enghsh novelists, 192
Austen-Leigh, Mr,, Jane Austen's
13
194
INDEX.
biographer, 12 ; quoted, 14, 15,
18, 19, 25, 40, 183, 184
B.
Basingstoke, 15
Bath, 16, 28-30, 105
Blair, Dr., Jane Austen's favourite
preacher, 53
Braboume, Lord, editor of Jane
Austen's letters, 12 ; quoted,
78, 134, 187
Byron, Lord, 22
C.
Chawton, near Winchester, 33
Clergy, of Jane Austen's day, 54
Cooper, Dr. (Jane Austen's uncle),
16
Cooper, Edward (Jane Austen's
cousin), 16
Cooper, Jane (Jane Austen's
cousin), 16
Country life as depicted by Jane
Austen, 56-59
Cowper, influence of, 21
Crabbe, influence of, 21, 60
E.
Egerton, Mr., first publishes Jane
Austen's works, 33
" Emma," written, 33 ; published,
34 ; dedicated to Prince Regent,
36 ; quoted, 31, 47, 48, 61, 63 ;
description and critique of plot
and characters, 1 18-139
Frencli Revolution and the novels,
45-46
G.
Gentry, the, supplied most of the
characters of Jane Austen's
QOvels, 60
T.
Inglis, Sir R. H., quoted, 52
J.
Johnson, Dr., influence of, 22
K.
Knight, Edward (Jane Austen's
brother), 13, 33
Knight, Mr,, adopts Edward
Austen, 13
"Lady Susan," discussed, 180-
183
Leigh, Dr. Theophilus (Jane
Austen's great-uncle), 13
Leiyh, Rev. Thomas (Jane
Austen's grandfather), 13
I^etters of Jane Austen, 12 ;
quoted, 16, 23, 32, 39, 40 ; dis-
cussed, 42-43
IJoyd, Miss, 33
Lyme, 30, 31
M.
Macaulay, Lord, his opinion of
Jane Austen's works, 35, 189-190
Manners of her time, Jane Austen
and the, 48-51
"Mansfield Park," written, 33;
published, 34; quoted, 31, 52;
plot and principal characters
discussed, 140-158 ; minor cha-
racters, 158-166
Marines, the, 47
Marriages, mercenary, 51-2.
Martineau, Miss, admires "Per-
suasion," 167
INDEX.
195
Mitford, Miss, admires " Per-
suasion,'' 167
Morality, Jane Austen's, 55
N.
Nature, Jane Austen a lover of,
44
Navy, the, 46, 164, 165-6
Nobility, the, Jane Austen's treat-
ment of, 62
" Northanger Abbey," written,
25 ; its publication, 25, 34 ;
quoted, 55 ; description of plot
and characters, 102-117 ; its
style, 186
Novel, a perfect, Jane Austen's
view of, 55
"Persuasion,'' quoted, 19; writ-
ten, 33 ; published, 34 ; dis-
cussion of the plot and principal
characters, 167-174 ; the minor
characters, 174-179 ; faults of
construction, 179-180 ; its style,
186
Poor, the, Jane Austen and, 60-62
Portsmouth, 30-31
" Pride and Prejudice," written,
24 ; its publication, 25, 34 ; an
accoimt of its plot, 66-78 ; and
characters, 78-88
Quarterly Review quoted, 18, 35
Radcliffe, Mrs., 102-103
Religion, Jane Austen and, 52-53
Richardson, Samuel, influence of,
21
Romance, absent from Jane Aus-
ten's works, 59
S.
Scott, Sir W., 22 ; quoted, 35
"Sense and Sensibility,'' written,
25 ; published, 33, 34 ; quoted,
28-29, 64 ; chief characters and
plot discussed, 89-95 \ minor
characters, 95-101
Sentimentality, Jane Austen a foe
to, 44
Southampton, 30-32
Spectator, The, Jane Austen's
opinion of, 22
Stael, Madame de, 34-35
.Steventon, 12-14, 28
Tory, Jane Austen a, 45-48
W.
''Watsons, The," a fragment,
29 ; discussed, 183-4
Winchester, 39 ; Jane Austen
buried in the Cathedral, 41
Women, Jane Austen's views of,
50-52
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
BY
JOHN P. ANDERSON
(British Museum).
1
I. WOKKS.
II. Appendix—
Ill, Chronological
Biography, Giiticism, etc.
Works,
Magazine Articles.
List
OF
I. WORKS,
Jane Austen's Works.
London, 1882, 8vo,
6 vols.
Letters. Edited, with an intro-
duction and critical remarks, by
Edward, Lord Brabourne. 2
vols. London, 1884, 8vo.
Emma : a novel. 3 vols. Lon-
don, 1816, 12mo.
Another edition. {Standard
Novels, No. 25.) London,
1833, 8vo.
Emma : a novel.
Library, vol. xxv.)
1849, 8vo.
Another edition.
{Popular
London,
1857, 8vo.
New edition.
Svo.
Another
London,
London, 1870,
edition. London
[1883], 8vo.
Mansfield Park : a novel. 3 vols.
London, 1814, 12mo.
Another edition. {Standard
Novels, No. 27.) London,
1833, 8vo.
Another edition. {Parlour
Novelist, vol. iv.) Belfast,
1846, Svo.
Another edition, (Parlour
Library, vol. Ix.) London,
1851, Svo.
11
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Mansfield Park : a novel. Lon-
don, 1857, 8vo.
Another edition. [Taucltnitz
Collection of British Authors,
vol. 883.) Leipzig, 1867, 12mo.
New edition. London, 1870,
8vo.
New edition. London, 1870,
8vo.
Part of the "Select library of
Fiction."
Another edition. Illustrated
by A. F. Lydon. London,
Driffield [printed, 1875], 8vo,
Another edition. London
[1877], 8vo,
Part of " The Ruby Series."
-Another edition. London
[1883], 8vo,
Northanger Abbey ; and Persua-
sion. With a biographical
notice of the autlior. 4 vols.
London, 1818, 12mo.
Another edition. (Standard
Novels, No. 28.) London,
1833, 8vo.
-Another edition.
(Parlour
London,
London,
1857, 8vo.
Part of the " Railway Library."
-New edition. 2 pts. Lon-
Library, vol. xlvii.)
1850, 8vo.
Another edition.
don, 1870, 8vo.
— Another edition.
don, 1870, 8vo.
Another edition.
2 pts. Lon-
2 pts. Lon-
don [1877], 8vo.
Part of " The Ruby Series."
Pride and Prejudice. 3 vols.
London, 1813, 12nio.
Second edition, 3 vols. Lon-
don, 1813, 12mo.
Another edition. (Standard
Novels, No. 30.) London, 1833,
8vo.
Another edition. 2 vols.
London, 1844, 16mo.
Pride and Prejudice. 2 vols. Lon-
don, 1846, 8vo.
Another edition. London,
1852, 8vo.
-New edition. London, 1870,
8vo.
— Another edition. London
[1883], 8vo.
-Another edition. (CasselVs
Red Library.) London [1886],
8vo.
Sense and Sensibility, a novel.
By a "Lady. 3 vols. London,
1811, 12mo.
Another edition. (Standard
Novels, No. 23.) London,
1833, 8vo.
Another edition. 2 vols.
London, 1844, 16mo.
— Another edition. London,
1852, 8vo.
-Another edition. ( Tauchnitz
Collection of British Authors,
vol. 735.) Leipzig, 1864,
12mo.
-New edition. London, 1870,
Svo.
— New edition. [With memoir
of Miss Austen.] Loudon,
1870, 8vo.
Part of the "Select Library ol
Fiction."
— Another edition. London
[1883], Svo.
— Another edition. London
[1884], Svo.
II. APPENDIX.
Biography, Criticism, etc.
Cone, Helen G., and Gilder, J. L.
— Pen - Portraits of Literary
Women. 2 vols. New York
[1888], Svo.
Jane Austen, voL i., pp. 196-220.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Ill
Elwood, Mrs. — Memoirs of the
literary ladies of England, etc.
2 vols. London, 1843, 8vo.
Jane Austen, vol. ii, pp. 174-186.
Encyclopedia Britannica. Ninth
edition. Edinburgh, 1875, 4to.
Jane Austen, vol. iii.
Forsyth, William. — The Novels
and Novelists of the Eitrhteenth
Century, etc. London, 1871, 8vo.
Jane Austen, pp. 328-337.
Hale, Sarah Josepha. — Woman's
Eecord ; or, Sketches of all Dis-
tinguished Women, etc. Second
edition. New York, 1855, 8vo.
Jane Austen, pp. 184-194.
Kavanngh, Julia. — English
Women of Letters, etc. 2 vols.
London, 1863, 8vo.
Miss Austen, vol. ii., pp. 180-236.
Lang, Andrew, — Letters to Dead
Authors. Loudon, 1886, 8vo.
To Jane Austen, pp. 75-85.
Leigh, J. E. Austen. — A Memoir
of Jane Austen, by her nephew.
London, 1870, 8vo.
Second edition, to which is
added Lady Susan and frag-
ments of two other unfinished
tales by Miss Austen. London,
1871, 8vo.
Maiden, Mrs. Charles. — Jane
Austen. {Emiiwnt Women
Series.) London, 1889, 8vo.
Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret 0. — The
Literary History of England in
the end of the Eighteenth and
beginning of the Nineteenth
Century, 3 vols. London, 1882,
8vo,
Jane Austen, vol. iii., pp. 221-237.
Stephen, Leslie. — Dictiouary of
National Biography. Edited
by Leslie Stephen. Loudon,
1885, 8vo.
Jane Austen, by Leslie Stephen,
vol. ii., pp. 259, 260.
Thackeray, Anne Isabella. — A
Book of Sibyls. Lon don , 1 883,
8vo.
Jane Austen, pp. 197-229.
Tytler, Sarah — i.e., Henrietta
Keddie. — Jane Austen and her
Works. With a portrait on
steel. London [1880], 8vo.
Another edition. London
[1884], 8vo.
Whately, Richard, Archbishop of
Dublin. — Miscellaneous Lec-
tures and Reviews. London,
1861, 8vo.
Review of Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion, pp. 282-313 ; appeared
originally in the Quarterly Review,
1821.
Magazine Articles.
Austen, Jane. Edinburgh Re-
view, vol, 51, 1830, pp. 448-
450. — New Monthly Maga-
zine, vol. 95, 1852, pp. 17-
23 ; same article, Littell's
Living Age, vol. 33, pp 477-
480. — North American Review,
by J. F. Kirk, vol. 77, 1853,
pp. 201-203. — Eclectic Magazine
(from the AthenEeum), vol. 37,
1856, pp. 197-200.— Eraser's
Magazine, vol. 61, 1860, pp.
30-35.— Atlantic Monthly, by
A. M. Waterston, vol. 11,
1863, pp. 235-240 ; same article,
Littell's Living Age, vol. 76,
418 - 422. — Englishwoman's
Domestic Magazine, vol. 2, 3rd
Series, 1866, pp. 237-240,
278-282; vol. 14, 3rd Series,
pp. 187-189 ; vol. 24, 3rd
Series, pp. 267-271. — Saint
Paul's, vol. 5, 1870, pp. 631-
643. — Harper's New Monthly
Magazine (Illustrated), by S. S.
Conant, vol. 41, 1870, pp.
225-233.— Fortnightly Review,
by T. E. Kebbel, vol. 7, N.S.,
1870, pp. 187-193.— Hours at
w
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Austen, Jane,
Home, by Anne Maunint;, vol.
11, 1870. pp 516-522.— Nation,
by Goldwin Smith, vol. 10,
1870, pp. 121-126. — North
British Review, vol. 52, 1870,
pp. 129-152, —Cornhill Maga-
zine, vol. 2-1, 1871, pp. 1 '8-174;
same article, Littell's Living
Age, vol. 110, pp. 643-653.—
Temple Bar, vol, 64, 1882, pp.
350-365 ; same article, Littell's
Living Age, vol. 153, pp. 43-52,
and Eclectic Magazine, vol. 35
N.S., pp. 615-624. — Argosy, by
Alice King, vol. 34, 1882, pp.
187-192 — Dublin Review, vol.
10, 3rd Series, 1SS3, pp. 103-
129. -Time, by W. Robertson,
Feb. 1889, pp. 193-201.
ami Charlotte Bronte. Modern
Review, by A, Armitt, vol, 3.
1882, pp. 384-396 ; same article,
Littell's Living Age, vol, 153,
pp, 368-373.
-and George Eliot. National
Review, by T. E. Kebbel, vol.
2, 1883, pp. 259-273.
— and hur Novels. Dublin
Review, vol. 15, N.S., 1870,
pp. 430-457.
-a7id Miss Mitford Black-
wood's Edinburgh Magazine,
vol. 107, 1870, pp. 290-313 ;
same article, Littell's Living
Age, vol. 105, pp. 38-5">. —
Quarterly Review, by G. F.
Chorley, vol. 128, 1870, pp. 196-
218 ; same article, Littell's Liv-
ing Age, vol. 104, pp. 558-569,
— and !^tylc. Macmillan's
Magazine, vol, 51, 1884, pp.
84-91 ; same article, Littell's
Living Age, vol, 164, pp. 58-64.
-at Home. Fortnightly Re-
view, by T. E. Kebbel, vol. 37
N.S., 1885, pp. 262-270.
Austen, Jane.
Early Writinrjs of. Nation,
by E. Quincy, vol. 13, 1871,
pp. 164, 165.
Emma. Quarterly Review,
by Sir Walter Scott, vol. 14,
1815, pp. 188-201.
Hunting for Snakes at lAjme,
Regis. "Temple Bar, vol. 57,
1879, pp. 391-397 ; same article,
Littell's Living Age, vol. 143,
pp. 633-637.
Letters of. Spectator, Nov.
8, 1884, pp. 1482-1483,— Satur-
day Review, vol. 58, 1884, pp.
637, 638.— Temple Bar, vol. 67,
1S83, pp. 285-287,— Academy,
by T, W, Lyster. vol, 26, 1884,
pp. 333-334.— Athenaeum, Nov.
8, 1884, pp, 585-586.
More Views of. Gentleman's
Magazine, bv G. B. Smith, vol.
258, 1885, ))p. 26-45.
Northangcr Abbey, and
Fcrsuasion. Quarterly Review,
by Archbishop Whateley, vol,
24, 1821, pp. 352-376; re-
printed in Miscellaneous Lectures
and Memoirs, 1861,
not Shallow. Temple Bar,
vol. 67, 1883, pp, 270-284;
same article, Littell's Living
Age, vol, 156, pp, 691-699.
Novels. Littell's
Living
Age, vol. 45, 1855, pp. 205-207.
— Black wood's Edinburgh Maga-
zine, vol. 86, 1859, pp. 99-113 ;
same article, Littell's Living
Age, vol. 62, pp. 424-436.—
Christian Examiner, by L M.
Luyster, vol. 74, 1863, pp.
400-421. — Chambers's Journal,
1870, pp. 157-160.— Spectator,
Dec. 16, 1882, pp. 1609-1611.
— Saturday Review, vol, 54,
1882, 827-8 28, —Literary World,
vol, 13, 1882, pp. 130-131.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
III. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AVORKS.
Sense and Sensibility . 1811
Pride and Prejudice . 1813
Mansfield Park . . 1814
Emma . . ■ 1816
Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion . 1818
Lady Susan, etc. . . 1871
(In J. E. Austell Leigh's Memoir
of Jane Austen.)
Letters . . . 1884
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